RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 



MATHEMATICS. By Philip E. B. Jourdain, M.A., Cambridge. 



Various. — The Presidential Address to the Mathematical 

 Association, delivered in January 191 7, was on the essential 

 nature of technical education and its relation to a liberal 

 education. It was by A. N. Whitehead (Math. Gaz. 191 7, 9, 

 20-33, and on pp. 29-57 °f the book on The Organisation 

 of Thought, reviewed elsewhere in the present number), and 

 the following sentences are very characteristic of British 

 logical work : " The thought which science evokes is logical 

 thought. Now logic is of two kinds, the logic of discovery and 

 the logic of the discovered. . . . The logic of the discovered 

 is the deduction of the special events which under certain cir- 

 cumstances would happen in obedience to the assured laws of 

 nature. . . . Without deductive logic science would be entirely 

 useless." 



The number of the Gazette (March 191 7) which contains this 

 Address contains also some important papers on the teaching 

 of mathematics by P. Abbott, C. J. L. Wagstaff, W. J. Dobbs 

 and J. L. S. Hatton, which were read at the same Annual 

 Meeting of the Mathematical Association. 



The same Gazette has lately added two interesting features 

 to its appearance, and both are due to the wonderful literary 

 research of its editor, W. J. Greenstreet. One is a series of 

 articles on some incidental writings of De Morgan ; and the 

 other is sets of " Gleanings from Far and Near," the object of 

 which is much too modestly stated to be to fill up space at the 

 ends of articles so that each article may begin at the top of a 

 fresh page. 



G. Loria {Boll, delta Mathesis, 1916, 32-9) discusses the tasks 

 of mathematical symbols. 



History. — L. C. Karpinski (Amer. Math. Monthly, 191 7, 24, 

 2 5 7-65) tries to show that much of the material of our elementary 

 algebra was long ago anticipated, to some extent, by the Egyp- 

 tians and Babylonians. Without doubt there seems, to the 

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