After Thought

"This book is by James Bailey. He wrote it in 1996, at the dawn of the age of the Internet. It’s for generalists, and it’s a very interesting look at the history of maths and science. Bailey’s thesis is that we create mathematical systems that fit with our needs and the tools that we have available. The Greeks wrote on papyrus, and the question they wanted to address was, ‘Where are we in the universe?’ In order to answer that, they came up with geometry, which also fit their medium. You can draw right angles and circles on papyrus. A little bit to the east, in Persia, people used reed styluses to poke in clay tablets. It was harder to do geometric forms that way, so they worked in algebra. With the Scientific Revolution, all of a sudden you had mechanical clocks. The question was no longer ‘Where are we?’, but ‘How do we measure or predict the pace of change from one place to another?’ So Newton and Leibniz came up with calculus. Lines and circles do not work well in movable type, which is what they were using, and so they described their findings with algebraic formulae of letters and numbers. If you move ahead to the 1920s, the job of the first electronic computers was to replace people doing computations, and speed that process up. But now, Bailey says, we’re entering a new age, where what we’re looking for is patterns in enormous sets of data. He argues that we need new types of maths — and new types of machine configurations — to address that. It’s an extremely interesting and well-written book. Bailey worked for one of the early super-computing companies, founded by Danny Hillis. They were doing sophisticated parallel processing. They divided up the work and distributed it to a lot of different computers, analysing enormous amounts of data and looking for patterns. Watson does this too. It’s a different kind of thinking. Bailey claims that we’re not educating ourselves for this; we’re educating ourselves and our children for the kind of maths Galileo needed, not the kind of maths the founders of Google or the Watson people are using. I found it a very engaging book, and I have trouble with maths and science books – I don’t usually finish them."