2013 January 21
It is 1872, and Asaph Hall III will soon be forty-three. He grew up on a small farm in the Berkshires, fell into poverty at thirteen when his father died, become a carpenter, taught himself simple mathematics to help with his trade, dreamt of becoming an architect. Then he had seen an item in the New York Tribune that changed his life: New York Central College at McGrawville in the Finger Lakes region was advertising what would now be called a work-study programme, a classical education for labourers.
Angelo Hall, biographer of his parents, would someday write: "Massachusetts educators [i.e., presumably, Horace Mann] would have us believe that a young man of twenty-five should have spent nine years in primary and grammar schools, four years more in a high school, four years more at college, and three years more in some professional school. Supposing the victim to have begun his career in a kindergarten at the age of three ... at twenty-five his education would be completed. He would have finished his education, provided his education had not finished him. Now at the age of twenty-four or twenty-five Asaph Hall 3rd only began serious study ..."
In some ways Central College was much like any other. Two years earlier, a student named William Austin had written a letter to his family describing life at a place which "begins to seem like home ... a beautiful section of country somewhat uneven but just enough to waken mankind to the romantic beauties of nature." It might have been written by a student of almost any school or era, but one line reveals it to be an anomaly for 1852: "The Ladies all room at the hall."
Central College was co-educational; it was also biracial, a foundation established by radical Baptist fundamentalists on the cutting edge of every movement for social change. (Here, perhaps, the modern reader may feel that the past is indeed a foreign country.) Astonishingly, even the faculty at Central College originally included Blacks, among them the mathematician Charles L. Reason. Western New York in the first half of the 1800s was impoverished, rural, and deeply divided, the "Burnt-Over Country" of religious sectarians, utopian revolutionaries, and tough, conservative farmers. In 1852 the hostility of the local community and the limits of tolerance even within the hearts of some liberal reformers had brought Central College to a crisis when one of the Black professors, William G. Allen, became engaged to a white student. A mob attacked Allen, who narrowly escaped lynching; the couple fled to England with help from Louisa May Alcott's uncle (the incident would later become the basis of one his niece's sensational short-stories, "M.L."); and the already-struggling college, derided in the Syracuse newspaper as a "nigger institution", began a precipitous decline which would lead to its closure in 1860.
This was the precarious institution of higher learning in which Asaph Hall had enrolled, and where he quickly established himself as top student in mathematics. Among his teachers was a student assistant, a suffragist in bloomers named Angeline Stickney who became his wife. A typical Baptist feminist zealot, she felt no shame at having attended what she dryly termed "an unpopular institution". She wrote back to the college after her departure:
"I expect to get the name that I have heard applied to all who come here, 'fanatic'... Let me live, let me die a fanatic. I will not seal up in my heart the fountain of love that gushes forth for all the human race ... [T]here are none here to say, 'thus far thou mayst ascend the hill of Science and no farther.' ... I can see my brother gathering those golden fruits [of knowledge], and ... there are none here to whisper, 'that is beyond thy sphere, thou couldst never scale those dizzy heights'; but, on the contrary, here are kind voices cheering me onwards." Nevertheless, as so often happened even in the most idealistic Nineteenth-Century circles, she soon abandoned her own promising scientific career to become, almost literally, her husband's muse.
The Halls had wandered the Midwest, peripatetic school-teachers on the edge of beggary. They returned to the East; Asaph was hired as an assistant at the Harvard Observatory for a wage too low to live on, and began calculating for almanacs on the side. During the Civil War his fortunes improved; he obtained a senior post at the Naval Observatory and once gave a distinguished visitor a tour of the heavens. A journalist would later write [ Popular Science 45, 833 (1894)]:
"A few nights later the trap- door opened again, and the same figure appeared. He told Prof. Hall that after leaving the observatory he had looked at the moon, and it was wrong side up as he had seen it through the telescope. He was puzzled, and wanted to know the cause, so he had walked up from the White House alone. Prof. Hall explained to him how the lens of a telescope gives an inverted image, and President Lincoln went away satisfied." Whether the story is true or one of the countless Lincoln legends, who can say?
But now it is 1872. Hall's greatest achievement, or from history's point of view his
only achievement, is still five years ahead:
urged on by Angeline after despairing of success, he
will discover ... But his concern today is with theory, not with
observation. How hard it is for an outsider to master mathematics! And how much of that
difficulty comes from the books! He writes -- a Letter to the Editor:
It was the opinion of Dr. Samuel Johnson that everything
ought to be persecuted in order that we may know whether
it is worthy to live or not. There is, doubtless, a good deal of
truth in this opinion, and the idea or the man that cannot endure
and overcome a considerable amount of difficulty is of but little
value. Still there must be a reasonable limit to persecutions and
difficulties, and hence I hope that the praiseworthy efforts of the
English mathematicians to improve their text-books of geometry
will be successful.
In considering such a matter as the improvement of
text-books, an extensive knowledge of the experience of
all classes of students will be valuable, and as many of the
mathematical books profess to be written for those who are not
fortunate enough to have a teacher, an account of the difficulties
which such a one has experienced may be of some interest.
1. I place first among these difficulties the practice common to
nearly all mathematical writers, of restricting the number of
axioms or fundamental assumptions, making them fewer than
they naturally are. It is worse than useless to attempt to prove
something that is self-evident, or which is so nearly so that it is
impossible to make any proof illustrate it. In all such cases it
would be better to state frankly and clearly that we make an
assumption, depending on observation to justify it. An example
of this superfluous proof may be found in many of the books on
rational mechanics, where we are told that a body cannot move
out of the place [sic; should it read "plane"?] of the forces,
because we know of no reason
why it should move to one side rather than the other; therefore,
&c.
Of useless definitions we have an example in a popular
work on arithmetic, where we are told that " time is the measurement
of duration," and a few pages further on that "duration is
a portion of time." Allied to this is the contemptible habit of
those who explain, with kind condescension and with great detail,
all insignificant matters, while at the same time they cover up or
dodge by some such phrase as " it is evident " the really difficult
points.
2. I do not object to a frequent and thorough application of
the differential calculus in a text-book, and such an application
seems to me better than the coarse processes under which this
calculus is sometimes concealed; but there is a habit, common
to young writers, of introducing forced and difficult demonstrations
where more simple ones would be better. An illustration
may be found in one of our best books on astronomy. In the
first edition of this book the author gave a long and difficult
demonstration of the well-known formula for the transformation
of rectangular co-ordinates in a plane. The demonstration was
made to depend on the solution of functional equations by means
of the differential calculus, and is an awkward thing to place at
the beginning of a text-book. In the second edition, having
removed this demonstration and supplied its place by a simple
one, the author has made the first chapter of his book the best
synopsis of spherical trigonometry that I know of.
3. An error of the English text-books written by Cambridge
men is, I think, the great number of examples given at the close
of each chapter. At least one-half of these should be omitted.
It is a great mistake to keep the student lingering over the never-ending
questions of conic sections, of maxima and minima, &c.,
and to give him the habit of solving petty problems, when he
should be led forward as soon as possible to the study of the
memoirs of those who have created the science.
In this
connection it seems to me a mistake in treating the differential
calculus to confine ourselves rigorously to the notion of a limit.
Although the doctrine of limits may be the only logical foundation
of this calculus, the student as he advances must soon become
familiar with differentials, and it is well that he should make
their acquaintance in his text-book.
4. A defect, perhaps of teaching rather than of text-book, is
the ignorance of all American students of numerical and
logarithm calculations, and from my slight observation I infer
that such is the case also with English students. It is not
uncommon to hear such calculations spoken of with contempt, but
there is nothing that gives one a clearer idea of the meaning of
analytical formulæ than to make a numerical application of them.
In this matter it seems to me that the assistance of a teacher is
of much more importance than in dealing with theoretical
difficulties, since with these a student must generally be left to
himself, while a little advice from a skilful computor will save the
beginner much time and trouble.
5. Finally I mention, as a source of some confusion and
perplexity to the student, the changes of notation and the introduction
of new names. Some such change and inventions will be
necessary with the progress of science, but any which tend to
mar the symmetry of analytical expressions, and render less easy
the reading of the great mass of mathematical literature that we
already possess, should be avoided. To call a well-known function a
"wonnumetonomy, " or a "subcontra-wonnumetonomy,"
does not of course endow it with any new properties, or make
its discussion one whit easier, although we may gain a slight
advantage in the way of brevity of reference. For my own part I
hope that this introduction of words of thundering sound, and
the calculation of almost interminable formulæ, for which no
more ingenuity is required than for a numerical calculation, is
only premonitory to the invention of a calculus of operations
which shall furnish us with shorter and more powerful methods
of investigation.
ASAPH HALL
Washington, August 16
What Hall will discover in 1877. (Video by 20Bond09)
THE NET ADVANCE OF PHYSICS
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