Christian Mathematician

Christian Mathematicians – Stokes

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By Steve Bishop

(Disclaimer: The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of GodandMath.com. Guest articles are sought after for the purpose of bringing more diverse viewpoints to the topics of mathematics and theology. The point is to foster discussion. To this end respectful and constructive comments are highly encouraged.)

George Stokes (1819-1903)

George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) was born in a rectory in Skreen, Ireland. He was the son of an evangelical rector, Revd Gabriel Stokes, and the youngest of six children. All three of his elder brothers became vicars.

Stokes attended schools in Skreen, Dublin and Bristol.  He graduated in mathematics from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1841 and remained at Cambridge until his death in 1903.

He was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1849. A position previously held by Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage among others. He did much to restore the tradition of mathematical physics in Cambridge. He helped develop the now highly prestigious Cavendish Laboratory. He held the Lucasian chair for 54 years.

He was secretary (1854-1885) and then president (1885-1890) of the Royal Society.

He was an applied mathematician who worked in the area of fluid dynamics (hydrostatics), but also did work on light.

He gave his name to the following:

  • Stokes’ law
  • Stokes’ theorem
  • Stokes line
  • Stokes number
  • Stokes relations
  • Stokes shift and
  • Navier–Stokes equations

Craters on the moon and on Mars have also been named after him.

Stokes was a life long friend and correspondent with physicist and fellow Christian Lord Kelvin (William Thompson).

According to Josipa Petrunic:

“Stokes argued mathematics was, and always would be, secondary to physical experimentation in terms of developing scientific knowledge. While math could help describe and formalize our observations, he claimed, it alone could not prove anything about the various phenomena we observe.” Petrunic (nd)

In 1886 Stokes became the president of the evangelical organization the Victoria Institute (VI) and was vice president of the Evangelical British and Foreign Bible Society and active in the Church Missionary Society. One aim of the VI was:

To investigate fully and impartially the most important questions of Philosophy and Science, but more especially those that bear upon the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture, with the view of defending these truths against the oppositions of Science, falsely so called.

The VI was founded in 1865 and published The Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute from 1867. It is still published under the new title of Faith and Thought. Stokes contributed several articles (see below) to the journal.

He delivered the 1891-93 Gifford lectures on the topic of natural theology. In it he contrasted the idea of divine design with materialism. He maintained that materialism is unable to explain certain phenomena such as the law of gravitation.

References

Petrunic, Josipa (no date) “George Stokes” http://www.giffordlectures.org/Author.asp?AuthorID=160

Articles by Stokes in JTVI

“On the bearings of the Study of Natural Science, etc., on our Religious Ideas,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 14 (1880): 227-248

“On the bearings of the Study of Natural Science, etc., on our Religious Ideas,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 14 (1880): 227-248.

“Annual Address,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 20 (1888):10-15.

“The One Origin of the Books of Revelation and of Nature,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 22 (1890): 11-23.

“The Luminiferous Ether. Annual Meeting,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 28 (1896): 89-103.

“Perception of Light. Annual Address,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 29 (1897): 11-24.

“Rontgen Rays. Annual Address, 1896,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 30 (1898): 13-28.

“Perception of Colour. Annual Address, 1897,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 31 (1899): 254-259.

Further resources

George Gabriel Stokes (1893). Natural theology: The Gifford lectures, delivered before the University of Edinburgh in 1893. Adamant Media Corporation. Available online here: http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPNATT&Volume=0&Issue=0&TOC=TRUE

David Wilson, David (1984) A physicist’s alternative to materialism: the religious thought of George Gabriel Stokes. Victorian Studies, 28:69-96, Autumn 1984.

David Wilson, David (1987) Kelvin and Stokes: A Comparative Study in Victorian Physics. Adam Hilger, 1987.

 

Steve Bishop is the compiler of A Bibliography for a Christian Approach to Mathematics and the author of several articles on the relationship between faith and math. Look for future posts from him in this series on Christian Mathematicians.

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Christian Mathematicians – Salmon

joshwilkerson4 Comments

By Steve Bishop

(Disclaimer: The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of GodandMath.com. Guest articles are sought after for the purpose of bringing more diverse viewpoints to the topics of mathematics and theology. The point is to foster discussion. To this end respectful and constructive comments are highly encouraged.)

George Salmon (1819-1904)

 Revd George Salmon (1819-1904) spent all of his academic life at Trinity College, Dublin. He graduated from there in mathematics in 1839 and in 1841 he was given a mathematics teaching post. He eventually became the Provost of the College in 1888, a post he held until his death in 1904.

Gow (1997), in a brief biography, writes that despite not making any major mathematical discoveries Salmon “exerted a great influence on mathematical research and teaching in Europe and America in the second half of the 19th century.”

Salmon was a fine mathematician who spent much of the last years of his career studying and writing theology. He was ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1844.

He published around 40 research papers in mathematics largely dealing with issues in algebraic geometry and three successful academic textbooks:

  • A Treatise on Conic Sections (1848)
  • A Treatise on Higher Plane Curves (1852)
  • A Treatise on the Analytic Geometry of Three Dimensions (1862)

From 1860s he devoted his time to theology and wrote a number of theological book including:

  • Prayer (1849)
  • The eternity of future punishment (1864)
  • The reign of law (1873)
  • Non-miraculous Christianity (1881)
  • Introduction to the New Testament (1885)
  • The infallibility of the Church (1888)
  • Thoughts on the textual criticism of the New Testament (1897)

Nesbitt (2005) comments: “George Salmon’s life and work is an excellent example of how complementary the study of both mathematics and theology can be” and “his mathematical brilliance was a factor in his theological works, especially in his analytical approach and process orientated approach to find meaning and truth.”

He was also a keen chess player. He used the analogy of a chess game many times in his theological works.

Salmon is buried with family members in a vault in Dublin near the grave of another Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.

References

Gow, Rod (1997) “George Salmon 1819-1904: His mathematical work and influence” IMS Bulletin 39: 26-76. Available online http://www.maths.ucd.ie/~rodgow/salmonims.pdf

Nesbitt, Sarah (2005) “George Salmon: from mathematics to theology” http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Salmon_theology.html

Further reading

Some of Salmon’s works are available here: http://www.tracts.ukgo.com/george_salmon.htm

 

Steve Bishop is the compiler of A Bibliography for a Christian Approach to Mathematics and the author of several articles on the relationship between faith and math. Look for future posts from him in this series on Christian Mathematicians.

Previous Entries in this Series:

Christian Mathematicians – Venn

joshwilkerson6 Comments

By Steve Bishop

(Disclaimer: The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of GodandMath.com. Guest articles are sought after for the purpose of bringing more diverse viewpoints to the topics of mathematics and theology. The point is to foster discussion. To this end respectful and constructive comments are highly encouraged.)

John Venn (1834-1923)

John Venn (1834-1923) was in a line of distinguished evangelical Venns. John’s grandfather John Venn[1] (1759-1813) was the founder of the Church Missionary Society and a member of the influential ‘Clapham sect’. His great-grandfather, Henry Venn (1725-1797), was involved with the revivalist George Whitefield and wrote The Complete Duty of Man (1763).[2] His father Henry (1796-1873) was the honorary secretary of the CMS 1841-1873.

Venn is perhaps best associated with Venn diagrams. These were introduced in 1880, in his ‘On the diagrammatic and mechanical representation of propositions and reasonings’[3] Venn diagrams appear in a stained glass window at Caius Hall, Cambridge University commemorating the work of Venn.

His work in logic and statistics and then history was equally influential.

Venn was born on 4 August 1834 in Hull, the son of Henry (1796 -1873) and Martha Sykes. His mother died in 1840 while he was still young. He had a strict upbringing and it was always assumed that he would follow in the family tradition of attending Cambridge University and then entering the priesthood. He entered Goniville and Caius in Cambridge in 1853. He graduated in 1857. He was ordained deacon in 1858 and ordained as a priest a year later.

He served two curacies at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire (1858-59) and at Mortlake in Surrey (1860-62). He then returned to Caius as Lecturer in Moral Science. Part of his responsibilities involved the development of the Moral Science Tripos.

In 1867 he married Susanna Carnegie Edmonstone, the daughter of Revd Charles Welland. Their only son John Archibald Venn was born in 1883.

He was a Hulsean lecturer in 1869; his lectures were published as Some Characteristics of Belief, Scientific and Religious. During this time at Cambridge Venn was lecturing in logic and probability theory and wrote three important books on logic: The Logic of Chance (1866); Symbolic Logic (1881); and The Principles of Empirical Logic (1889). The first was described as ‘a book that should be read by every thinking man’, by the philosopher Charles Pierce.[4] It was in this book that the mathematical terms ‘significance’ and ‘rule of succession’ were first used.

In 1883 Venn made use of the 1870 Clerical Disabilities Act and left the priesthood. In the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. According to his son he always remained a man of religious conviction.

In 1888 he donated his collection of logic books to the university and he devoted himself to history. He wrote a history of his college Caius College[5], and with his son part 1 of Alumni Cantabrigienses: Biographical list of all known Students, Graduates , and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge from the earliest Times to 1900.[6] In 1904 he wrote a family history: The Annals of a Clerical family, which traced his family back to the seventeenth century.

He was made president of his college in 1903.

He died on 4 April 1923 and is buried in Trumpington, Cambridge.

[1] Michael M. Hennell John Venn and the Clapham Sect (Luterworth: Cambridge, 1958, reprinted 2002).

[2] Complete Duty of Man: or a System of Doctrinal and Practical Christianity. Designed for the Use of Families. A New Edition, Carefully Revised and Corrected by Rev. H. Venn, B.D. of St. John’s Holloway American Tract Society, 1838

[3] Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science S. 5. Vol. 9. No. 59. July 1880.

[4] North American Review 105 (July 1867): 317-21.

[5] Cambridge University Press, 1935.

[6] The ten volume 5700 pages has been reprinted By Thoemmes Press, 2001; the original was published fom1922-54.

Steve Bishop is the compiler of A Bibliography for a Christian Approach to Mathematics and the author of several articles on the relationship between faith and math. Look for future posts from him in this series on Christian Mathematicians.

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