Math in the Lives of Two English Professors
By Dr. Eugene Maier |
They had much in common. Both were born in the 1860's and both died in the 1940's. Both attended Yale University as undergraduates and both, after receiving Ph. D. degrees in literature, taught at Yale. They became full professors within a year of one another and remained colleagues until their retirements. Both wrote autobiographies. Even their names were alliterative. But they differed vastly in one respect. William Lyon Phelps abhorred mathematics. Wilbur Lucius Cross relished it.
Mathematics, Phelps wrote in recounting his school experiences, "were the curse of my life at school and college, and had more to do with my unhappiness than any other one thing, and I bitterly regret the hours, days, weeks, months and years that I was forced to spend on this wholly unprofitable study." He promises to return to this subject later in his autobiography with "more venom." And he does.
While describing his college days at Yale, Phelps digresses to vent his rage at all things mathematical: "…for those who have no gift and no inclination, mathematics are worse than useless—they are injurious. They cast a blight on my childhood, youth, and adolescence. I was as incompetent to deal with them as a child to lift a safe. I studied mathematics because I was forced to do so…. After 'long division' nearly every hour spent on the subject was worse than wasted. The time would have been more profitably spent in manual labor, in athletics, or in sleep. These studies were a brake on my intellectual advances; a continuous discouragement and obstacle, the harder I worked, the less result I obtained. I bitterly regret the hours and days and weeks and months and years which might have been profitably employed on studies that would have stimulated my mind instead of stupefying it."
It's not only his own circumstances he deplores, but the tragic fate of "hundreds who were deprived of the advantage and privilege of a college education because of their inability to obtain a passing mark in mathematics. They were sacrificed year after year to this Moloch [an ancient deity worshiped by the sacrifice of children]."
Cross, on the other hand, found arithmetic easy and prided himself on his ability to make mental calculations. In college, he recalls, " I was almost equally interested in pure and applied mathematics. Euclid…fascinated me, not because it added anything new to my knowledge of geometry, but by the art portrayed by the old Greek mathematician in proving by a strict deductive method the truth of propositions which any one might see were true at a glance. It was like traveling over a beautiful road to the foreseen end of one's journey. Likewise, in a course in analytical geometry…, we played with the curves of algebraic equations which fell into strange and wonderful patterns, rivaling anything I have ever seen in the most fantastic designs of wallpaper. Though drawn in the first instance to higher mathematics by a kind of artistic sense, I maintained a secondary interest in mathematics as the foundation of science. The more difficult the problem, the more intense was my desire to attempt its solution."
Though each is treated in the other's autobiography as an esteemed colleague, no mention is made of any discussion between them about their polar views of mathematics. If there were, I suspect it did nothing to change these views, which in all likelihood were deep-seated, emotionally-laden beliefs springing from their childhood experiences and the messages they received from the authorities in their lives.
Phelps says nothing of his mathematics teachers or classes. Whatever went on in school or at home, it's clear he heard some of the saws about mathematics that still hold sway today, e. g., some people simply do not have a mind for math—which he accepts and cites as the cause of his