Gunpowder and Geometry by Benjamin Wardhaugh

Author:Benjamin Wardhaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008299972
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-01-11T17:00:00+00:00

During the long decade from the appearance of the Dictionary to that of the Abridgement, Hutton’s activity and his public persona were focused no longer on practical experiment, hands-on surveying and the other dirty business of practical mathematics, but on text, and text in huge quantities. Whatever the role of assistants, his work on Dictionary and Course, Recreations and Abridgement must have taken up a substantial portion of his time, against a background of personal disaster and the chaos of war at the Royal Military Academy.

It was possible to be very sharply critical, to say that Hutton had spent a decade and more on scissors-and-paste work. But that was to miss the point. The compilations and translations he had produced were not about intellectual innovation or conceptual novelty. Rather, he had carefully, deliberately, made himself the leading voice speaking for mathematics in English. And he had given the English-speaking world a series of massive monuments to its mathematical culture: monuments whose endurance was never in serious doubt.

More than that, these works were finely crafted tools. Citations of ‘Hutton’s Dictionary’, ‘Hutton’s Recreations’ and the rest would become ubiquitous in discussions of scientific and mathematical subjects, in writing about mathematics and its place in culture and education. It’s not too much to say that Hutton, by providing them, changed the way English speakers spoke and thought about mathematics. His view of what mathematics was, of what it included and excluded, and where and how it was relevant, became the norm, and he did more than anyone else to make mathematics an accepted part of British culture, an accepted strand of British science.

Yes, much of the work on these books could have been done by any competent translator, editor, compiler: and some of it probably was. But Hutton knew what he was about. In the face of hostility to mathematics from parts of the scientific and the literary worlds, through these massive works he both consolidated his own reputation beyond doubt, and gave unique, permanently valuable service to the mathematical culture he knew and loved.

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