At Books & Culture, Timothy Larsen reviews two recent books on the metaphysics of mathematics, Daniel J. Cohen’s Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith and Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician? One of the anecdotes from Equations from God that he discusses concerns Thomas Hill, onetime president of Harvard:
[…] his exuberance for the powers of spiritual uplift inherent in this discipline seemingly knew no bounds. He traced the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to its failure to appreciate the idealist perspective on geometry. Likewise, if a research university had been established in antebellum America to nurture original work in mathematics, the Civil War might have been averted. It was absurd to imagine that one could keep the teaching of religion out of state schools, he averred, because that would necessitate banning geometry.
An on Is God a Mathematician?:
Livio, an astrophysicist working for the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, makes it clear that the Platonic view is very much a live one among contemporary mathematicians. His book explores the question of whether math is discovered (and thus reveals, as it were, divine thoughts—the Platonic view) or is merely a human construct (the formalist view), while at the same time offering a lively account of the history of the discipline that explains mathematical concepts clearly and cogently for non-specialists.
Continue reading at Books & Culture.