Churchill
on Mathematics
From Winston Chirchill, My Early life: 1874–1904, beginning of Chapter III, all underlines are mine (N.C.)
EXAMINATIONS
IT
TOOK me three tries to pass into
Sandhurst. There were five subjects, of which
Mathematics, Latin and English were obligatory, and I chose in addition
French and Chemistry. In this hand I held
only a pair of Kings—English
and Chemistry. Nothing less than three
would open the jackpot. I had to find another useful card. Latin I could not learn.
I had a rooted prejudice which seemed to close my mind
against it. Two thousand marks were given for Latin. I might perhaps get 400!
French
was interesting but rather tricky,
and difficult to learn in England. So there remained only
Mathematics. After the first Examination was over, when
one surveyed the battlefield, it was evident that the war
could not be won without another army being brought into the line.
Mathematics was the only resource available. I
turned to them—I
turned on them—in
desperation. All my life
from time to time I have had to get up disagreeable subjects
at short notice, but I consider my triumph, moral and
technical, was in learning Mathematics in six months.
At the first of these three ordeals I got no more than 500
marks
out of 2,500
for
Mathematics. At the second I got nearly
2,000. I
owe this achievement not only to my own 'back-to-the-wall'
resolution—for which no credit is too great;
but to the very kindly interest taken in my case by a
much respected Harrow master, Mr. C. H. P. Mayo. He convinced
me that Mathematics was not a hopeless bog of nonsense,
and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the
comical hieroglyphics; and that I was not incapable of catching
glimpses of some of these.
Of
course what I call Mathematics is only what the Civil Service Commissioners
expected you to know to pass a very rudimentary examination. I suppose that
to those who enjoy this peculiar gift, Senior
Wranglers
and the like, the waters in
which
I swam must seem only a
duck-puddle compared to
the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless,
when I plunged in, I was
soon out of my depth. When I look back upon those care-laden
months, their prominent features rise from the abyss
of memory. Of course I had progressed far beyond Vulgar Fractions and the Decimal System. We were arrived in an
'Alice-in-Wonderland' world, at the portals of which stood
'A Quadratic Equation.' This with a strange grimace pointed
the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full
rigours of the Binomial Theorem.
Further dim chambers lighted by sullen, sulphurous
fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the 'Differential Calculus.'
But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service
Commissioners who regulated this stage of
Pilgrim's heavy journey. We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the
Delectable Mountains, but into a
strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called
Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially
when multiplied by each other, or by
themselves! They had also this merit—you
could learn many of their evolutions off by heart. There was a question in my
third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly
square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after
life. It was a problem. But luckily I had seen its ugly face only
a few days before and recognised it at first sight.
I
have never met any of these creatures since. With my third and successful examination they passed away like the phantasmagoria
of a fevered dream. I am assured that they are most helpful in engineering,
astronomy and things like that. It is very important to build bridges and canals
and to comprehend all the stresses and
potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even
universes and measuring how far off they are, and foretelling eclipses, the arrival
of comets and such like. I am very glad there
are quite a number of people born with
a gift and a liking for all of this;
like great chess-players who play sixteen
games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy.
Serve them right! I hope the
Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded.
I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.
I
had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth
beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one
might see the transit of Venus—or
even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through
infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I
saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable:
and how the one step involved all the others. It
was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!
The
practical point is that if this aged, weary-souled Civil Service Commissioner
had not asked this particular question about these Cosines or Tangents in their
squared or even cubed condition, which I
happened to have learned scarcely a
week before, not one of the subsequent chapters of this book would ever
have been written. I might have gone into the
Church and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious
contradiction to the age. I might have gone
into the City and made a fortune. I might have resorted
to the Colonies, or 'Dominions' as they are now called,
in the hopes of pleasing, or at least placating them; and
thus had, ŕ la Lindsay
Gordon or Cecil Rhodes, a lurid career. I might even have gravitated to
the Bar, and persons might have been hanged through my defence who now nurse their
guilty secrets with complacency. Anyhow the whole of my life
would have been altered, and that I suppose
would have altered a great many other lives, which in their
turn, and so on.
But
here we seem to be getting back to mathematics, which I
quitted for ever in the year 1894...