[831]. Nemo mathematicus genium indemnatus habebit. [No mathematician[2] is esteemed a genius until condemned.]
Juvenal, Liberii, Satura VI, 562.
[832]. Taking ... the mathematical faculty, probably fewer than one in a hundred really possess it, the great bulk of the population having no natural ability for the study, or feeling the slightest interest in it.[3] And if we attempt to measure the amount of variation in the faculty itself between a first-class mathematician and the ordinary run of people who find any kind of calculation confusing and altogether devoid of interest, it is probable that the former could not be estimated at less than a hundred times the latter, and perhaps a thousand times would more nearly measure the difference between them.—Wallace, A. R.
Darwinism, chap. 15.
[833]. ... the present gigantic development of the mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause.—Wallace, A. R.
Darwinism, chap. 15.
[834]. Dr. Wallace, in his “Darwinism”, declares that he can find no ground for the existence of pure scientists, especially mathematicians, on the hypothesis of natural selection. If we put aside the fact that great power in theoretical science is correlated with other developments of increasing brain-activity, we may, I think, still account for the existence of pure scientists as Dr. Wallace would himself account for that of worker-bees. Their function may not fit them individually to survive in the struggle for existence, but they are a source of strength and efficiency to the society which produces them.—Pearson, Karl.
Grammar of Science (London, 1911), Part 1, p. 221.
[835]. It is only in mathematics, and to some extent in poetry, that originality may be attained at an early age, but even then it is very rare (Newton and Keats are examples), and it is not notable until adolescence is completed.—Ellis, Havelock.