XXII
BELLWATTLE ON THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS
I have already been at some pains in a few of these pages to give an idea of the feminine appreciation of mathematics. Undoubtedly it is more practical than that of many an eminent mathematician. For let it at once be understood that the first function of a higher mathematician is to express himself in terms of mathematics, just as an artist expresses himself in the colours he lays upon his canvas, or a musician by the little black and white dots he writes between and through the lines.
“Nobody”—so a scientist once said to me—“nobody seems to understand this. They have never learnt the language we talk in and they fancy that we only fit our place in the universe so long as we are useful. If I were to talk to you now of the things I am doing in my laboratory, using the terms and the technicalities that I use there, you’d probably think I was endeavouring to be scientifically brilliant in my conversation, stringing together all the most exaggerated words to get an effect which you could not understand; whereas, in reality, I should be talking the most ordinary commonplaces which even the boy who cleans out the vessels and the flasks can probably understand. Let a man invent a talking machine, or a calculating machine, and they call him a great scientist. Good heavens! If you knew how the real scientists and the real mathematicians despise him. Why, I’ve seen a mathematician express the soul in himself so absolutely by the solution of an abstruse problem, that he has cried with joy like a child—like an artist when he has finished his masterpiece, a writer when he has ended his book.”
“May I never burst into tears, if ever I write a book,” said I.
“Well—you know what I mean,” said he.
And I suppose I did know. Utility is the prostitution of most things as well as science and mathematics. But that is just where women are more practical mathematicians than men. I have never known a woman set out to express herself in mathematics yet. What is more, I pray God, most fervently, I never shall. She will employ the wildest means of expression in the world, but nothing so wild or incoherent as mathematics.
I try to conceive a woman in a fit of jealousy sitting down to express her emotions through the medium of the binomial theorem—which I must tell you I know to be a method of expanding X and Y, bracketed to the Nth power, to an infinite series of powers—I try to conceive her doing that, but my conception always fails. Far more readily can I see her inviting to tea the creature who is the cause of her jealousy, and evincing the sweetest friendship for her. Now that is expression, if you like, bracketed, moreover, without any necessity for your binomial theorem, to the Nth power, and expanded to an infinite expression of femininity.
To give you just the simplest example of this matter of the practicality of women in mathematics, I must tell you that Cruikshank and I the other evening were recalling our prowess at Euclid; setting each other problems to prove—well, you know the routine of the propositions of Euclid.
In the midst of darning some socks and, having listened to us in silence for at least an hour, Bellwattle looked up.