Men of Mathematics Read online

  Zeno of Elea (495–435 B.C.) was a friend of the philosopher Parmenides, who, when he visited Athens with his patron, shocked the philosophers out of their complacency by inventing four innocent paradoxes which they could not dissipate in words. Zeno is said to have been a self-taught country boy. Without attempting to decide what was his purpose in inventing his paradoxes—authorities hold widely divergent opinions—we shall merely state them. With these before us it will be fairly obvious that Zeno would have objected to our “infinitely continued” division of that two-inch line a moment ago. This will appear from the first two of his paradoxes, the Dichotomy and the Achilles. The last two, however, show that he would have objected with equal vehemence to the opposite hypothesis, namely that the line is not “infinitely divisible” but is composed of a discrete set of points that can be counted off 1,2,3, . . . . All four together constitute an iron wall beyond which progress appears to be impossible.

  First, the Dichotomy. Motion is impossible, because whatever moves must reach the middle of its course before it reaches the end; but before it has reached the middle it must have reached the quarter-mark, and so on, indefinitely. Hence the motion can never even start.

  Second, the Achilles. Achilles running to overtake a crawling tortoise ahead of him can never overtake it, because he must first reach the place from which the tortoise started; when Achilles reaches that place, the tortoise has departed and so is still ahead. Repeating the argument we easily see that the tortoise will always be ahead.

  Now for the other side.

  The Arrow. A moving arrow at any instant is either at rest or not at rest, that is, moving. If the instant is indivisible, the arrow cannot move, for if it did the instant would immediately be divided. But time is made up of instants. As the arrow cannot move in any one instant, it cannot move in any time. Hence it always remains at rest.

  The Stadium. “To prove that half the time may be equal to double the time. Consider three rows of bodies

  First Position

  Second Position

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  (B)

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  one of which (A) is at rest while the other two (B), (C) are moving with equal velocities in opposite directions. By the time they are all in the same part of the course (B) will have passed twice as many of the bodies in (C) as in (A). Therefore the time which it takes to pass (A) is twice as long as the time it takes to pass (C). But the time which (B) and (C) take to reach the position of (A) is the same. Therefore double the time is equal to half the time.” (Burnet’s translation.) It is helpful to imagine (A) as a circular picket fence.

  These, in non-mathematical language, are the sort of difficulties the early grapplers with continuity and infinity encountered. In books written twenty years or so ago it was said that “the positive theory of infinity” created by Cantor, and the like for “irrational” numbers, such as the square root of 2, invented by Eudoxus, Weierstrass, and Dedekind, had disposed of all these difficulties once and forever. Such a statement would not be accepted today by all schools of mathematical thought. So in dwelling upon Zeno we have in fact been discussing ourselves. Those who wish to see any more of him may consult Plato’s Parmenides. We need remark only that Zeno finally lost his head for treason or something of the sort, and pass on to those who did not lose their heads over his arguments. Those who stayed behind with Zeno did comparatively little for the advancement of mathematics, although their successors have done much to shake its foundations.

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  Eudoxus (408-355 B.C.) of Cnidus inherited the mess which Zeno bequeathed the world and not much more. Like more than one man who has left his mark on mathematics, Eudoxus suffered from extreme poverty in his youth. Plato was in his prime while Eudoxus lived and Aristotle was about thirty when Eudoxus died. Both Plato and Aristotle, the leading philosophers of antiquity, were much concerned over the doubts which Zeno had injected into mathematical reasoning and which Eudoxus, in his theory of proportion—“the crown of Greek mathematics”—was to allay till the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

  As a young man Eudoxus moved to Athens from Tarentum, where he had studied with Archytas (428-347 B.C.), a first-rate mathematician, administrator, and soldier. Arriving in Athens, Eudoxus soon fell in with Plato. Being too poor to live near the Academy, Eudoxus trudged back and forth every day from the Piraeus where fish and olive oil were cheap and lodging was to be had for a smile in the right place.

  Although he himself was not a mathematician in the technical sense, Plato has been called “the maker of mathematicians,” and it cannot be denied that he did irritate many infinitely better mathematicians than himself into creating some real mathematics. As we shall see, his total influence on the development of mathematics was probably baneful. But he did recognize what Eudoxus was and became his devoted friend until he began to exhibit something like jealousy toward his brilliant protégé. It is said that Plato and Eudoxus made a journey to Egypt together. If so, Eudoxus seems to have been less credulous than his predecessor Pythagoras; Plato however shows the effects of having swallowed vast quantities of the number-mysticism of the East. Finding himself unpopular in Athens, Eudoxus finally settled and taught at Cyzicus, where he spent his last years. He studied medicine and is said to have been a practising physician and legislator on top of his mathematics. As if all this were not enough to keep one man busy he undertook a serious study of astronomy, to which he made outstanding contributions. In his scientific outlook he was centuries ahead of his verbalizing, philosophizing contemporaries. Like Galileo and Newton he had a contempt for speculations about the physical universe which could not be checked by observation and experience. If by getting to the sun, he said, he could ascertain its shape, size, and nature, he would gladly share the fate of Phaëthon, but in the meantime he would not guess.

  Some idea of what Eudoxus did can be seen from a very simple problem. To find the area of a rectangle we multiply the length by the breadth. Although this sounds intelligible it presents serious difficulties unless both sides are measurable by rational numbers. Passing these particular difficulties we see them in a more evident form in the next simplest type of problem, that of finding the length of a curved line, or the area of a curved surface, or the volume enclosed by curved surfaces.

  Any young genius wishing to test his mathematical powers may try to devise a method for doing these things. Provided he has never seen it done in school, how would he proceed to give a rigorous proof of the formula for the circumference of a circle of any given radius? Whoever does that entirely on his own initiative may justly claim to be a mathematician of the first rank. The moment we pass from figures bounded by straight lines or flat surfaces we run slap into all the problems of continuity, the riddles of the infinite and the mazes of irrational numbers. Eudoxus devised the first logically satisfactory method, which Euclid reproduced in Book V of his Elements, for handling such problems. In his method of exhaustion, applied to the computation of areas and volumes, Eudoxus showed that we need not assume the “existence” of “infinitely small quantities.” It is sufficient for the purposes of mathematics to be able to reach a magnitude as small as we please by the continued division of a given magnitude.

  To finish with Eudoxus we shall state his epochal definition of equal ratios which enabled mathematicians to treat irrational numbers as rigorously as the rationals. This was, essentially, the starting-point of one modern theory of irrationals.

  “The first of four magnitudes is
said to have the same ratio to the second that the third has to the fourth when, any whatever equimultiples [the same multiples] of the first and third being taken, and any other equimultiples of the second and fourth, the multiple of the first is greater than, equal to, or less than the multiple of the second, according as the multiple of the third is greater than, equal to, or less than the multiple of the fourth”

  Of the Greeks not yet named whose work influenced mathematics after the year 1600 only Apollonius need be mentioned here. Apollonius (260?–200? B.C.) carried geometry in the manner of Euclid—the way it is still taught to hapless beginners—far beyond the state in which Euclid (330?–275? B.C.) left it. As a geometer of this type—a synthetic, “pure” geometer—Apollonius is without a peer till Steiner in the nineteenth century.

  If a cone standing on a circular base and extending indefinitely in both directions through its vertex is cut by a plane, the curve in which the plane intersects the surface of the cone is called a conic section. There are five possible kinds of conic sections: the ellipse; the hyperbola, consisting of two branches; the parabola, the path of a projectile in a vacuum; the circle; and a pair of intersecting straight lines. The ellipse, parabola and hyperbola are “mechanical curves” according to the Platonic formula; that is, these curves cannot be constructed by the use of straightedge and compass alone, although it is easy, with these implements, to construct any desired number of points lying on any one of these curves. The geometry of the conic sections, worked out to a high degree of perfection by Apollonius and his successors. proved to be of the highest importance in the celestial mechanics of the seventeenth and succeeding centuries. Indeed, had not the Greek geometers run ahead of Kepler it is unlikely that Newton could ever have come upon his law of universal gravitation, for which Kepler had

  prepared the way with his laboriously ingenious calculations on the orbits of the planets.

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  Among the later Greeks and the Arabs of the Middle Ages Archimedes seems to have inspired the same awe and reverence that Gauss did among his contemporaries and followers in the nineteenth century, and that Newton did in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Archimedes was the undisputed chieftain of them all, “the old man,” “the wise one,” “the master,” “the great geometer.” To recall his dates, he lived in 287-212 B.C. Thanks to Plutarch more is known about his death than his life, and it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that the typical historical biographer Plutarch evidently thought the King of Mathematicians a less important personage historically than the Roman soldier Marcellus, into whose Life the account of Archimedes is slipped like a tissue-thin shaving of ham in a bull-choking sandwich. Yet Archimedes is today Marcellus’ chief title to remembrance—and execration. In the death of Archimedes we shall see the first impact of a crassly practical civilization upon the greater thing which it destroyed—Rome, having half-demolished Carthage, swollen with victory and imperially purple with valor, falling upon Greece to shatter its fine fragility.

  In body and mind Archimedes was an aristocrat. The son of the astronomer Pheidias, he was born at Syracuse, Sicily, and is said to have been related to Hieron II, tyrant (or king) of Syracuse. At any rate he was on intimate terms with Hieron and his son Gelon, both of whom had a high admiration for the king of mathematicians. His essentially aristocratic temperament expressed itself in his attitude to what would today be called applied science. Although he was one of the greatest mechanical geniuses of all time, if not the greatest when we consider how little he had to go on, the aristocratic Archimedes had a sincere contempt for his own practical inventions. From one point of view he was justified. Books could be written on what Archimedes did for applied mechanics; but great as this work was from our own mechanically biased point of view, it is completely overshadowed by his contributions to pure mathematics. We look first at the few known facts about him and the legend of his personality.

  According to tradition Archimedes is a perfect museum specimen of the popular conception of what a great mathematician should be. Like Newton and Hamilton he left his meals untouched when he was deep in his mathematics. In the matter of inattention to dress he even surpasses Newton, for on making his famous discovery that a floating body loses in weight an amount equal to that of the liquid displaced, he leaped from the bath in which he had made the discovery by observing his own floating body, and dashed through the streets of Syracuse stark naked, shouting “Eureka, eureka!” (I have found it, I have found it!) What he had found was the first law of hydrostatics. According to the story a dishonest goldsmith had adulterated the gold of a crown for Hieron with silver and the tyrant, suspecting fraud, had asked Archimedes to put his mind on the problem. Any high school boy knows how it is solved by a simple experiment and some easy arithmetic on specific gravity; “the principle of Archimedes” and its numerous practical applications are meat for youngsters and naval engineers today, but the man who first saw through them had more than common insight. It is not definitely known whether the goldsmith was guilty; for the sake of the story it is usually assumed that he was.

  Another exclamation of Archimedes which has come down through the centuries is “Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth” ( as he said it in Doric). He himself was strongly moved by his discovery of the laws of levers when he made his boast. The phrase would make a perfect motto for a modern scientific institute; it seems strange that it has not been appropriated. There is another version in better Greek but the meaning is the same.

  In one of his eccentricities Archimedes resembled another great mathematician, Weierstrass. According to a sister of Weierstrass, he could not be trusted with a pencil when he was a young school teacher if there was a square foot of clear wallpaper or a clean cuff anywhere in sight. Archimedes beats this record. A sanded floor or dusted hard smooth earth was a common sort of “blackboard” in his day. Archimedes made his own occasions. Sitting before the fire he would rake out the ashes and draw in them. After stepping from the bath he would anoint himself with olive oil, according to the custom of the time, and then, instead of putting on his clothes, proceed to lose himself in the diagrams which he traced with a fingernail on his own oily skin.

  Archimedes was a lonely sort of eagle. As a young man he had studied for a short time at Alexandria, Egypt, where he made two life-long friends, Conon, a gifted mathematician for whom Archimedes had a high regard both personal and intellectual, and Eratosthenes, also a good mathematician but quite a fop. These two, particularly Conon, seem to have been the only men of his contemporaries with whom Archimedes felt he could share his thoughts and be assured of understanding. Some of his finest work was communicated by letters to Conon. Later, when Conon died, Archimedes corresponded with Dositheus, a pupil of Conon.

  Leaving aside his great contributions to astronomy and mechanical invention we shall give a bare and inadequate summary of the principal additions which Archimedes made to pure and applied mathematics.

  He invented general methods for finding the areas of curvilinear plane figures and volumes bounded by curved surfaces, and applied these methods to many special instances, including the circle, sphere, any segment of a parabola, the area enclosed between two radii and two successive whorls of a spiral, segments of spheres, and segments of surfaces generated by the revolution of rectangles (cylinders), triangles (cones), parabolas (paraboloids), hyperbolas (hyperboloids), and ellipses (spheroids) about their principal axes. He gave a method for calculating π (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter), and fixed π as lying between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71; he also gave methods for approximating to square roots which show that he anticipated the invention by the Hindus of what amount to periodic continued fractions. In arithmetic, far surpassing the incapacity of the unscientific Greek method of symbolizing numbers to write, or even to describe, large numbers, he invented a system of numeration capable of handling numbers as large as desired. In mechanics he laid down some of the fundamental postulates, discovered the laws of levers, and
applied his mechanical principles (of levers) to calculate the areas and centers of gravity of several flat surfaces and solids of various shapes. He created the whole science of hydrostatics and applied it to find the positions of rest and of equilibrium of floating bodies of several kinds.

  Archimedes composed not one masterpiece but many. How did he do it all? His severely economical, logical exposition gives no hint of the method by which he arrived at his wonderful results. But in 1906, J. L. Heiberg, the historian and scholar of Greek mathematics, made the dramatic discovery in Constantinople of a hitherto “lost” treatise of Archimedes addressed to his friend Eratosthenes: On Mechanical Theorems, Method. In it Archimedes explains how by weighing, in imagination, a figure or solid whose area or volume was unknown against a known one, he was led to the knowledge of the fact he sought; the fact being known it was then comparatively easy (for him) to prove it mathematically. In short he used his mechanics to advance his mathematics. This is one of his titles to a modern mind: he used anything and everything that suggested itself as a weapon to attack his problems.

  To a modern all is fair in war, love, and mathematics; to many of the ancients, mathematics was a stultified game to be played according to the prim rules imposed by the philosophically-minded Plato. According to Plato only a straightedge and a pair of compasses were to be permitted as the implements of construction in geometry. No wonder the classical geometers hammered their heads for centuries against “the three problems of antiquity”: to trisect an angle; to construct a cube having double the volume of a given cube; to construct a square equal to a circle. None of these problems is possible with only straightedge and compass, although it is hard to prove that the third is not, and the impossibility was finally proved only in 1882. All constructions effected with other implements were dubbed “mechanical” and, as such, for some mystical reason known only to Plato and his geometrizing God, were considered shockingly vulgar and were rigidly taboo in respectable geometry. Not till Descartes, 1985 years after the death of Plato, published his analytic geometry, did geometry escape from its Platonic straightjacket. Plato of course had been dead for sixty years or more before Archimedes was born, so he cannot be censured for not appreciating the lithe power and freedom of the methods of Archimedes. On the other hand, only praise is due Archimedes for not appreciating the old-maidishness of Plato’s rigidly corseted conception of what the muse of geometry should be.