MATHELIATICS AND THE SCIENCES 



By J. W. LESLEY, JE. 

 Department of Mathematics, The University of North Carolina 



INTRODUCTION 



At the outset I wish to express my very sincere appreciation for the 

 evidence of trust on your part which makes this occasion possible for 

 me. It is quite a surprise when a group of scientists so honor a 

 teacher of mathematics, for it is a moot question as to whether 

 mathematics is a science. It is more than a surprise when that 

 teacher is your speaker, whose association with science has been more 

 that of a worshiper from afar than he likes to have to admit. 



The duties of this office resolve themselves in large part to the 

 retiring address which brings us here tonight. Upon asking myself 

 what I might say to you that might in part compensate you for 

 coming here, I thought it pertinent to consider with you the relation 

 between mathematics and the sciences. With this purpose in mind 

 I asked a philosopher colleague what he considered that relation to 

 be. His reply was quick and pointed. "There is no relation," he 

 said, "science thinks a thing in terms of other things; mathematics 

 thinks a thing in terms of itself." His inference was that the two 

 are mutually exclusive. This was very discouraging. 



The history of science, however, does not seem to bear out the 

 philosopher's contention. Until the time of Galileo (1600) that 

 history is practically a history of mathematics. Although we have 

 some knowledge of perhaps 6,000 years of mankind's intellectual ac- 

 tivity, we search in vain for any trace of science before 2,500 years 

 ago. True we have the pyramids, some 5,000 years old, and their 

 structure indicates the employment of scientific ideas. We have, 

 too, the Ehind papyrus, 3,500 years extant, and within its pages 

 a kind of mathematical science. But the first scientist to emerge 

 from the mists of antiquity was Thales, the mathematician of 2,500 

 years ago. Almost contemporary with him is Pythagoras, a strange 

 mixture of scientist and pseudo scientist. Two centuries later came 



* Retiring address of the president of the North Carolina Academy of Science, Wake 

 Forest, N. f^.. May 5, 1939. Reprinted by permission from the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell 

 Scientific Society, vol. 55, No. 2, December 1939. 



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