The Lumber Room

(Yes, this post is written just for the title. More details would be received gratefully.)

Over a period of 17 years from 1770 to 1787, Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was, among other things, a mammoth history (6 volumes, 71 chapters) of the last days of Rome, which for Gibbon apparently meant several centuries. (The book covers over thirteen centuries of history; here’s an outline.)

The work received instant praise. Adam Smith’s letter to Gibbon is typical:

“I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find that by the universal consent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”

The Decline and Fall became the model for all historians that followed — including its pessimism (history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”), its overarching narrative, and its indictment of religion.

It became a literary monument of the 18th century, and one of the works that every educated man was expected to have read, a part of every bookshelf. Churchill (“I devoured Gibbon. [...] I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all”), Carlyle (“how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of these barbarous centuries”), Virginia Woolf (“not merely a master of the pageant and the story; he is also the critic and the historian of the mind [...] We seem as we read him raised above the tumult and the chaos into a clear and rational air”)… everyone read The Decline and Fall and spoke of it in the highest terms. (Gandhi read it in jail, and considered it an inferior version of the Mahabharata.) It was read by doctors, politicians, lawyers, novelists, even Sanskrit professors.

But then times began to change. Education stopped being the reading of “classics“, and became the learning of “subjects”. Today, no one I know has read The Decline And Fall, nor considers it worth the time.

Quick: What is CCXXXVII × CCCXXIX?

From page 15 of The Life of Pi by Jonathan Borwein:

The Indo-Arabic system came to Europe around 1000 CE. Resistance ranged from accountants who didn’t want their livelihood upset to clerics who saw the system as ‘diabolical,’ since they incorrectly assumed its origin was Islamic. European commerce resisted until the 18th century, and even in scientific circles usage was limited into the 17th century.

The prior difficulty of doing arithmetic is indicated by college placement advice given a wealthy German merchant in the 16th century: “If you only want him to be able to cope with addition and subtraction, then any French or German university will do. But if you are intent on your son going on to multiplication and division — assuming that he has sufficient gifts — then you will have to send him to Italy.” (George Ifrah, p. 577)

[The rest of the pages of the slides are also great and worth reading!]

Just to give some context of the time: The Hindu-Arabic system was introduced into Europe by Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) — an Italian — in his Liber Abaci, written in 1202. Gutenberg (in Germany) invented the printing press around 1450. In Italy, Tartaglia lived 1500-1557, Cardano 1501-1576, Sturm 1507-1589, Giodano Bruno (1548-1600), and Ludovico Ferrari (1522-1565). (And outside Italy, Robert Recorde (as we’re talking about notation) (1510-1558) in Wales, François Viète (1540-1603) in France, etc. See this image.) Of course Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was Italian too, but came later, as did Newton, Fermat, the Bernoullis, and all the others.

While on the topic of mathematics and notation, see also this post: Visual Clarity in the Naming of Variables.
[And while not exactly notation, Donald Knuth's Calculus via O notation]

A BBC article, and an old nytimes article on the icon. The BBC pictures are nice.

Neither of them mentions Maddox, obviously :-)

The popular phrase, and an article about it. The image can be found easily, here for example.