"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell."

Original: "Quapropter bono christiano, sive mathematici, sive quilibet impie divinantium, maxime dicentes vera, cavendi sunt, ne consortio daemoniorum animam deceptam, pacto quodam societatis irretiant."


St Augustine filling out his tax returns without a calculator

Saint Augustine was actually having a go at astrologers (numerology was something of which he had been once been a great fan, now in later life he had turned against its practitioners with a vengeance) and for that he must be congratulated. However in Augustine's time and place as he spoke, the crumbling Western Roman Empire's North African territories during the early 6th century CE, the distinction between pseudo-scientific astrology and actual science and mathematics had become very blurred indeed, not least due to Augustine's own church having effectively begun suppressing anything of the latter from entering the public domain lest it encourage the faithful to deviate from their main responsibility - to worship and wonder at the Christian god's enigmatic incomprehensibility (at least to the great unwashed - "illuminati" like Augustine reckoned they had an inside line). To have expressed an interest in mathematics at the time therefore would have been a very dodgy proposition socially - using numbers for anything other than simple counting automatically placing you directly in the church's line of doctrinal fire and often with rather severe personal repercussions.

But the sentiment, if not the rather liberal translation of Augustine's latin, got me thinking. Given that his condemnation did indeed cover what we would now call "legitimate" or "bona fide" mathematicians, especially those who, god forbid - literally - attempted to advance their science, had he a point? Is there actually a category of mathematician in which practitioners of the skill might be construed as "evil"?

The definitions of evil in most dictionaries effectively centre on one elementary semantic concept - a tendency to work against one's fellows' welfare, be it expressed in philosophical, moralistic or didactically absolutist terms. This allows great scope for subjective application of the concept, which in turn allows us to retrospectively consider its application to prominent thinkers in our history. Are there in fact people in this broad historical group whose contributions to our welfare have, as it has turned out, been largely negative - even catastrophically so?

In this day and age we tend to learn early and accept as natural that we be uncritically grateful for the fact that our species has produced, often against the odds, illuminaries like Copernicus, Einstein, Newton and Oppenheimer, to name but a few of the most renowned practitioners of mathematical theory. I threw Oppenheimer in as he is probably the one about whom, in modern times, a degree of critical assessment of his immediate impact is actually encouraged. But in the modern age he is almost a unique example of the mathematician of whom, as Augustine implied, one should be wary before glibly praising for his or her skill.

Are there others who, on balance, have advanced our understanding at the possible or even manifest expense of our communal welfare?

My own view is that scientific knowledge of any sort is innately beneficial to our species but that its application has huge scope for evil in its execution. If, as Aristotle once averred, the faciltators of evil must be considered therefore a part of it, which mathematicians - and indeed scientists - over the years could well fall foul of such accusation, despite whatever contemporary kudos we pay them, and even despite a possibly genuine philantropical motive for their work?

I can't help but think of Albert Einstein's dismay over some directions that the practical uses of his theoretical work took. But should he be held responsible for the way in which others have abused his work? I say not, as it was never his intention, plus there has been great benefit in the implementation of his work in other areas, which balances the books in a way.

That the book requires to be balanced automatically admits his contribution to evil deeds, however remote from them he was in terms of intent, begging the question; is mere dismay enough to exonerate him from a share in the guilt? But I agree that Einstein represents a borderline case - one can argue both for and against him, even within Aristotle's philosophical strictures regarding responsibility. Oppenheimer on the other hand takes the disambiguation of evil to a whole other level in terms of our lack of certitude.

Kurt Prüfer, not a name known to most, presents a similar challenge. As a young man he followed the latest developments in thermodynamic theory with great understanding and interest, and then made a career from applying this theory to practical use in the manufacture of incinerators for organic material which eliminated unwanted noxious emissions in the process. His groundbreaking innovation is still utilised to our enormous benefit in several industrial applications - recycling and funereal cremation being just two of them. It was in the latter field however that his skills were most infamously employed. As chief designer for Topf & Sons his ovens, originally adapted for disposing of typhoid victims in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1939, were improved by his firm and deployed throughout the death camps run by the Nazis over the next five years.

For the Soviets there was no ambiguity about Prüfer's Aristotelean share of the guilt. Interrogated and released by the Americans he was then arrested by the Russians and spent the rest of his life in a gulag, dying in 1952. Prüfer published academically until his arrest, his commentaries on and contributions to thermodynamic theory still providing valuable instruction and insight for those studying the subject today.

Quote :

which mathematicians - and indeed scientists - over the years could well fall foul of such accusation,

It might be more difficult to try to think of those who couldn't., given the human tendency to take morally neutral knowledge and pervert it to less than admirable ends. I am reminded of the NRA dictum 'Guns don't kill, people kill' which although risible in their context, is in some sense true.

The opposite is also true: that knowledge gained in the pursuit of what might be defined as evil purposes, and the Manhattan project is one example, can be deployed for the general good. At a stretch even Newton's research was driven by the desire to explicate God's presence in creation, not a motive of which I would approve (that's a highly personal and situated viewpoint but all these judgements are) but has been unquestionably beneficial.

Aristotle would entirely agree with both your points - essentially two aspects to the same point - and then throw it back as a philosophical conundrum. How neutral can neutral be in a moralistic sense? Moral ambivalence can suggest neutrality but it can equally suggest amorality and ignorance on the part of the person who presents such neutral facts for consumption by others - to do with as they will. However if the pursuit of knowledge precludes addressing the knowledge of what then may well be done with one's discoveries in pursuit of evil policies, how incomplete could this pursuit be said to be, not least in terms of knowledge itself?

So then, the researcher, in any field, must consider all possible applications of that work before disseminating her results? I'm sure I have a vague recollection of something of that nature happening but I can't remember when or who; no doubt you will, assuming it's not my imagination.

That degree of prescience is usually impossible, I assume Newton did not foresee the use of his calculations in the prediction of the performance of an ICBM, or desirable. As in everyday life, the unfortunate outcome of one's actions can only be held against one if that outcome was predictable.

As to whether or not the search for knowledge should be curtailed by its possible bad outcomes, there isn't really a choice is there? Not unless we, as a species, renounce that quality which defines us? Like it lump it, the Golden Road is the only one we can take.

So you can see why the early church seized upon Aristotle as an originator of morality as they saw it - with Oppenheimer, for example, the outcome of the research was not "possible", it was predetermined from the word go and in fact formed the major reason for it being done at all.

However this is exactly where the dilemma arises with regard to responsibility. Meitner, Hahn and Frisch cannot not have been in doubt about the employment of nuclear fission as a weapon, the largely anonymous researchers still perfecting nuclear fusion capabilities even less so. This means that they and others in their situation on the "Golden Road" are actually faced with a stark choice in moral terms. They can either refuse to contemplate it at all or opt to defer responsibility for subsequent actions completely onto those who take them. Aristotle would have said that in purposefully ignoring the likelihood of personal guilt or in actively assigning it completely to others then they in fact acknowledge that guilt by association exists. This, in other words, whether they like it or not, is therefore part of their knowledge - something they have learnt and understood through the pursuit of scientific knowledge and with no less potential for impact on their fellow man for their moral stance as they do with the results of their scientific research.

I'm back in the library, limited time on a borrowed machine, and with other work to do, so please forgive random thoughts intruding on the elegantly reasoned exchanges above. These are the thoughts and questions which immediately came to my mind when I saw this thread.

i) Were other early thinkers (pre-Christian) suspicious of mathematics? How did Greek and Roman commentators respond to Euclid's "pricks and lines" and to the work of Pythagoras? Was any disquiet expressed? (Do hope that's not too a daft question.)

ii) "Thrice -greatest" Hermes Trismegistus - I can't remember - was he an Egyptian? Was he a mathematician as well as a mystic philosopher? Did he actually exist? How did the early Church view his writings? With absolute horror? Trismegistic thought was of great interest to Renaissance humanists, I think - via Bruno? Didn't the Inquisition get him in the end?

iii) The School of Night - Ralegh, Harry Percy, the "Wizard Earl" and the great Doctor Dee and others - all passionately interested in mathematics? Dee, I know was a great fan of Trismegistic thought. Was being a serious mathematician towards the end of the 16th century more or less synonymous with being an atheist? Yet the subject was taught at Oxford and Cambridge; indeed I've read recently in a biography of William Cecil that the Fellows of St. John's College were fascinated by mathematics and that they lectured on "the related subjects of arithmetic, geometry and perspective - Cecil would have read Euclid geometry." So Maths was not heresy - it was a respectable subject up to a point?

iv) Brings me to thoughts of Marlowe and Faustus. It was known that maths gone wrong could corrupt the unwary and lead to all manner of evil! Two scholars at King's College crossed the boundary when they progressed "from mathematics and applied themselves to demonic arts"! Wizards combined geometrical inscriptions (lines and crcles), signs, letters and alphabetic letters (plus a few zodiac symbols thrown in for good measure) to produce the weird formulae which enabled them to communicate directy with demons. Heady stuff of course for your adventurous M.A. student!
"Divinity adieu!
These necromatic books are heavenly:
Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters:
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires."
The mathematician/magician means to wield godlike powers - "All things that move between the quiet poles/Shall be at my command" - or so he thinks.

As Hermes put it: "Man takes on himself the attributes of a god, as though he were himself a god..."
Or a devil? Faustus with unwittting irony also decides he rather likes hell. He declares: "O, might I see hell, and return again, how happy were I then."
Which leads me to the not so happy Oppenheimer and his famous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds."
I'm all for mathematicians with their "pricks and lines" - but I'm also all for a bit of humility before the gods.
PS Not very happy with this, but will send it. My new computer is being set up on Wednesday, so I should be back to normal then, thank goodness.

I'm not aware of any organised or systemic opposition to the development or publication (in an ancient sense) of mathematical theory in Greece. The opposite in fact - it was so tightly enmeshed with philosophical thinking that I don't think it could even have been regarded as a separate study to be criticised anyway. However it is important to remember that what we know about the Greeks and mathematics is what others later recorded, not themselves. Its survival can be attributed to a contemporary lack of enemies as such, however the attribution that it lacked enemies could equally have been assigned simply because it survived through the agency of others. There is nothing certain there.

We do know that the Romans tended to dismiss mathematical theory that did not readily lend itself to practical application. But then there was also much that the Greeks had developed as mathematical theory that the Romans respected on purely philosophical grounds. Aristotle pointing out the difference between the indecomposable and the decomposable is representable using Euclid's "pricks and lines" and is in fact an extension of the same theory. Likewise his famous division of argument into axioms and postulates is also one rooted in mathematical theory. The Romans, and later the church, have always treated these theories as "purely" philosophical assertions which were then applied to rhetoric by Marcus Aurelius and theology by his Christian successors. It has taken until the modern era of quantum theory however to reincorporate them vigorously into mathematical thinking.

The Hermetic canon is not attributed to any one person any more, I don't think. It is a hotch-potch of various cherry-picked Stoic and Platonic platitudes, often completely out of context, employed to add a veneer of intellectuality to what is really just gibberish by and large. The alchemy and astrology of which it is mostly comprised may have caught the imagination in the Renaissance, but by the late 16th century it was increasingly being dismissed as the rubbish it is. Although it had pretensions to being ancient Egyptian on the part of its authors and its fans it appears to have actually originated in around the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE somewhere in the wider Hellenic world (probably Egypt even, though that is not relevant), and when this could be conclusively indicated the bottom fell out of the Hermetic business (they had probably forgotten to Hermetically seal it).

Your quote re Faustus is especially revealing, isn't it? It shows that a deep suspicion of mathematics was not something that necessarily lessened with the advent of institutionalised learning and increased access to knowledge. In fact in some places this only seems to have deepened it further. And I wonder whether there are any of us who, after struggling through Hawking's "Brief History ...", have not privately entertained the notion that we are in the presence of someone who - while not demonic - is most definitely not governed by the same base logic and thinking which constrains the rest of us. So who knows what morality prevails in that mind?

Yet by the next century, Aubrey writes this in his "Minutes of Lives" ("Brief Lives"). He is referring to Thomas Allen, one of the Wizard Earl's followers:


"In those dark times, astrologer, mathematician and conjuror were accounted the same things, and the vulgar did verily believe him to be a conjuror. He had a great many mathematical instruments and glasses in his chamber, which did also confirm the ignorant in their opinion, and his servitor (to impose on freshmen and simple people) would tell them that sometimes he should meet the spirits, coming up his stairs like bees."

So, the end of the 16th century was, to Aubrey writing around 1680(?), "those dark times" and those who saw the mathematician as a magician were "the vulgar", "the ignorant" and "simple people"! How quickly things change!

Checked out Hermes Trismegistus in MacCulloch's "History of Christianity". Nordmann, you were right, surprise, surprise:

"Among the flood of new and strange material from the ancient world, which might or might not be valuable if put to use, was a set of writings about religion and philosophy purporting to have been written by a divine figure from ancient Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus. In fact they had been compiled in the first to third centuries CE, at much the same time as early Christianity was emerging."


A maths undergraduate, Cambridge, circa 1590.

The Arabs were great mathematicians, I believe. Were Islamic religious leaders/teachers also wary of the subject?

Temperance wrote:

The Arabs were great mathematicians, I believe. Were Islamic religious leaders/teachers also wary of the subject?

Good question Temp. And I'm glad you've made the distinction between 'Arab' and 'Islamic'. It's one of those lazy conflations we hear all too often in the mass media.

The 'Golden Age of Islamic Science' (c. 8th Century - 13th Century) was strongly represented by Persian and Moorish elements as well as Arab. The language of writing, however, was generally Arabic and the public culture was undoubtedly Islamic. Considering that this culture extended from Iberia to India then alternative names such as 'Arab Science' or 'Eastern Science' are problematic. Somewhat counter-intuitively, therefore, the term 'Islamic Science' would seem to fit best.

As to whether or not there was a basic conflict between religious leaders and scientists (and specifically mathematicians) then this is a moot point. As in other cultures, academia was often beholden to powerful patrons. Needless to say that the attitudes of patrons towards scholarship could vary from era to era. In this respect the golden age of mathematics in Baghdad was relatively short lived. It enjoyed great patronage for about 100 years in the 8th and 9th Centuries before falling out of favour with later generations of Islamic rulers.

Vizzer wrote:

Good question Temp.

Actually, it was rather, wasn't it? See, I'm not as stupid as I look.

Vizzer wrote:

Temperance wrote:

The Arabs were great mathematicians, I believe. Were Islamic religious leaders/teachers also wary of the subject?

Good question Temp. And I'm glad you've made the distinction between 'Arab' and 'Islamic'. It's one of those lazy conflations we hear all too often in the mass media.

The 'Golden Age of Islamic Science' (c. 8th Century - 13th Century) was strongly represented by Persian and Moorish elements as well as Arab. The language of writing, however, was generally Arabic and the public culture was undoubtedly Islamic. Considering that this culture extended from Iberia to India then alternative names such as 'Arab Science' or 'Eastern Science' are problematic. Somewhat counter-intuitively, therefore, the term 'Islamic Science' would seem to fit best.

As to whether or not there was a basic conflict between religious leaders and scientists (and specifically mathematicians) then this is a moot point. As in other cultures, academia was often beholden to powerful patrons. Needless to say that the attitudes of patrons towards scholarship could vary from era to era. In this respect the golden age of mathematics in Baghdad was relatively short lived. It enjoyed great patronage for about 100 years in the 8th and 9th Centuries before falling out of favour with later generations of Islamic rulers.

Vizzer and Temperance,


Vizzer in answer to Temp's question I did in the time on a French and even our BBC forum some research in the heat of the French Goughenheim discussion: No Renaissance without Islam? You had the French rightist camp and the French leftist/muslim camp with a lot of insults in the papers...

I remember to have written about the tension between the Greek philosophy and the revealed religions as in the Latin Middle-Ages, the Byzantine and the Islam. For the Islam even in the period that you mentioned, the hightime of the Islamic science in Bagdad with the House of Wisdom...
http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=321&start=15

And overthere the article of the Greek rooted American:

http://archaeology.kiev.ua/pub/vryonis.htm
And from this article:
"What of philosophy? Was this practical? Here the answer is not clear cut. First, the writings of Aristotle covered a huge epistemological horizon, from the sciences of the heavens, the earth, and the waters. The horizon covered more abstract matters, such as the process of reasoning and logic, etc. We should also recall that the Galenic system of medicine, which had made such an incursion into Islamic civilization, contained a very important philosophical component, as we see in Galen's famous treatise entitled, "On the fact that the best physician is also a philosopher." Whatever the causes, the influx of Aristotle and other philosophical writings created a serious problem and constituted a grave threat to a civilization based on a revelational religion which gave priority to the truth of revelation over human logic. The unchecked introduction of Greek philosophy and philosophers threatened to undermine the bases and overthrow the nature of the Islamic faith. Here the revelational demands of Islam prevailed, and the roles of philosophy and logic were limited, at best, to the obligational support of the veracity of the faith. In short, Islamic civilization relegated philosophy and logic to the role of the handmaiden of theology, as occurred also in the Latin West and in Byzantium."

Kind regards, Paul.

Temperance,

our posts crossed while I was "constructing" my message...
Glad to see you, I already thought that...

Kind regards from your friend Paul.

I wish they'd told the nuns at my convent schools that maths were evil all those years ago.  Maths never were my strong suit though I did't work that hard at them it's true.  One teacher (a lay teacher not a nun incidentally) moaned about my work being untidy - to be fair she may have had some cause.  So one night I made the effort to do my working out neatly AND the teacher accused me of cheating and having someone else do my homework for me!  I kind of lost interest after that.

Mathematician with absolutely no redeeming features - Sigismund Arbuthnot.

nordmann wrote:

We do know that the Romans tended to dismiss mathematical theory that did not readily lend itself to practical application. But then there was also much that the Greeks had developed as mathematical theory that the Romans respected on purely philosophical grounds. Aristotle pointing out the difference between the indecomposable and the decomposable is representable using Euclid's "pricks and lines" and is in fact an extension of the same theory. Likewise his famous division of argument into axioms and postulates is also one rooted in mathematical theory. The Romans, and later the church, have always treated these theories as "purely" philosophical assertions which were then applied to rhetoric by Marcus Aurelius and theology by his Christian successors. It has taken until the modern era of quantum theory however to reincorporate them vigorously into mathematical thinking.

In the week when the United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs announced that the world’s population has surpassed 8,000,000,000 and that most people in the world today were born after 1990, it seems timely to look at an article on mathematics written 30 years before that. In 1960 the world’s population had just surpassed 3,000,000,000 and a popular statistic put out at the time was that, despite the huge number of people, the whole world’s population could, nevertheless, fit on the Isle of Wight. Of course a larger geographical area than the Isle of Wight would now be required to accommodate a population more than double what it was then. In 1960 such musings prompted physicist Eugene Wigner to write a paper called:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

In the article Wigner ponders on how mathematical patterns have often been confirmed in the sphere of physics and how these also often extend to the fields of chemistry and biology. The first paragraph of the article tells a joke about population statistics and highlights the differences between 2 fields of mathematics, namely arithmetic and geometry. In other words it shows how there is not just one sort of mathematician.

The development of mathematics in European thought, from Pythagoras onwards, reveals an intriguing appreciation of the discipline sometimes to the point of deification. Writing 100 years after the time of Pythagoras, the philosopher Plato viewed mathematics as being an eternal truth existing outside of the physical world but merely reflected by it. Another view, however, promoted by the likes of Albert Einstein, sees mathematics as a human invention and merely an attempt to formalise the natural world. Consequently this has resulted in 2 camps of thought developing among mathematicians - the Platonists and the formalists. One wonders that if mathematicians are indeed evil, then which of those 2 camps is the wickedest.

In Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" (1968) it's postulated that by 2010, the 7 billion inhabitants would need an island the size of Zanzibar (600 square miles). I wonder what today's stand-on location would need to be?

According to the BBC's "More or Less" in 2011 the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight, which I remember being fequently quoted as a "fact" since the 1970s when the world's population was about half what it is now. In 2011 when the BBC examined this, the global population was roughly 7 billion and so packed onto the Isle of Wight (area 385 km²) would give everyone just 0.06 m², or a space of about 12 by 8 inches. Since then the population has swelled by another billion people and so now we'd each only get roughly 10 by 8 inches of space, which must be close to the theoretical packing limit even with small children being held in their parents arms. In the USA similar examples typically cite the entire global population fitting - with only slightly more comfort - into New York City (area 780 km²) or the State of Rhode Island (3,150 km²).

However this rather misses the point. Of course it would be theoretically possible to cram 8 billion people into such comparitively small areas but the real issue is sustainable population density. If we all lived at the density that people live in Manhattan, the entire global population could fit in the United Kingdom; if we all lived at the density that people live in Bangladesh, the entire global population could fit in Australia; and if we all lived at the density that people live in the Netherlands, the entire global population could fit in Russia. However if all 8 billion of us lived like western Europeans, we would need another earth-like planet to provide the agricultural land, materials, oil and water. If we all lived like Americans we'd need another three planets.

Yes, the trend of Overshoot Day moving earlier and earlier in the year provides an interesting (to me at any rate) counterpoint. https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/06/Earth-Overshoot-Day-2022-Nowcast-Report.pdf

All mathematicians do is collect information already present in nature and logically combine them to get more of naturally occuring truths (which are a little more abstract and can't be detected so easily).

So, we can already make sure that theoretical mathematics is, in essence, nothing more than translation of universal law to human language. And so if we take the translators to be evil, we should take it for granted that the universal laws are also evil - which already makes no sense and can lead to some fatally absurd statements. 

To ensure that innovational mathematics is not evil would mean eventually concluding that mathematics in general is not (as I have already concluded that theoretical science is of no evil origin). 

Innovations, just like theories, are something that's naturally available. They are theoretically possible constructions, based upon universal law - which are "out there", only waiting to be invented. Man x is able to invent a machine and grant it a power to do some specific action. He gives it a task, which is of noble nature and gives it a purpose to serve to the welfare of mankind. If man y uses the machine in purpose which is evil, despite man x initially constructing it for the purpose of good - then the man y is evil, the man x is not. The man x had belief in mankind and believed that his invention would be used for the good. Can he be deemed evil for that? 

On the other side, there are scientists who purposefully make inventions which are designed to serve in opposition to mankind's welfare. Are those people evil? Well, you could say. But often they are physically forced to do it, which gives them the rational reasoning for the developement of invention. Oppenheimer, for example, was not forcefully put to construct his deadly invention. But, at the time, there was a serious danger that Germany might develop nuclear weapons before the US - and who then would he held responsible? Yes, Oppenheimer, who denied to work on the project. Maybe the entire world would be put under thousands years old dictatorship and extermination, only if he had not done what he did. I believe he has moral justification for his invention. So,  those who purposefully make deadly inventions often have strong justifications. Which might not always be the case, of course. 

So, there are evil mathematicians. Obviously. There are all kinds of evil people. But giving mathematicians the epithet of being evil is unjustified, as all they do is translate the language of nature into that we can understand. When they invent dangerous things, they most often (not every time) have strong justifications.

Burjov wrote:

All mathematicians do is collect information already present in nature and logically combine them to get more of naturally occuring truths (which are a little more abstract and can't be detected so easily).

So, we can already make sure that theoretical mathematics is, in essence, nothing more than translation of universal law to human language. And so if we take the translators to be evil, we should take it for granted that the universal laws are also evil - which already makes no sense and can lead to some fatally absurd statements.

That is very true and this has been recognised, at least by 'natural philosophers' (proto-scientists), for many centuries. As Galileo Galilei in his 'Opere Il Saggiatore' (1623) put it,
"[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word."

Putting aside number manipulation associated with some types of pseudoscience, such as numerology and astrology (which until the renaissance were often not clearly distinguished from mathematics) there is nevertheless at least one area of mathematics that is still popularly regarded with mistrust: statistics. As the popular phrase has it, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics." The phrase was popularised by the writer Mark Twain (amongst others) who attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, although it is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. The quotation however remains popular today where, perhaps through misunderstanding the maths involved, it is frequently quoted to somehow dismiss a mathematical interpretation of data-based information in favour of a simplistic 'common sense' conclusion. Like all branches of mathematics statistics cannot be inherently evil - although such data can certainly be used to support evil ideas - but statisticians are nevertheless still often popularly seen as untrustworthy and sometimes even little better than charlatans.

The modern study of statistics largely arose from studying probability and it was not by chance that several of these pioneering mathematicians were themselves inveterate gamblers. From the analysis of chance in coin-tossing, dice-throwing and card-playing, the mathematical basis of probability was developed, but it soon started to be applied to more general risks such as pensions, annuities and property insurance. For example Abraham de Moivre was the first to consider life expectancy as a matter of mathematical probability and then apply the results to pensions. But predicting how long someone might expect to live based on dispassionate numbers was at the time seen almost as blasphemous for surely it was God alone who could say when someone's time was up? Nevertheless the English king, William of Orange, was delighted by de Moivre's work (as a Huguenot de Moivre had fled his native France for London where he was introduced into society by fellow mathematicians Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton). King William had been paying military pensions annually at a fixed percentage of a soldier's original pay irrespective of how old the pensioner was. Accordingly he had been paying out a great deal of money to healthy ex-soldiers who had joined up in their teens and had retired in their twenties or thirties and who were now looking forward to perhaps a further forty years receiving exactly the same annual pension as older veterans who might have a similar length of service but perhaps now had only another decade to live. King William reformed his pension scheme based on the de Moivre's calculations, saved a lot of cash and was well pleased - his troops, especially the younger ones, were rather less satisfied, reckoning they had somehow been swindled by a mathematician, and moreover a French one too.

By the 19th century the UK's population was being recorded in increasingly detailed ways: for example national registration of births, marriages and deaths started in 1837; the first comprehensive national census was conducted in 1841; while following the expansion of Robert Peel's 1829 Metropolitan Police Act to all regions and cities, consistent crime statistics became available for the whole country from 1857 onwards. Statistical pioneers like Adolphe Quetelet started anaylising this newly available data looking for population trends and correlations. Quetelet, who called himself a "social physicist", was particularly interested in applying statistics to study criminology and social behaviour, while a few years later William Playfair revolutionised economics and politics by creating many of the graphs and bar charts that are now standard formats for presenting information and searching for correlations between different social and economic trends. Florence Nightingale, another founding fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, used statistics to hone patient care in hospitals. While she is most usually remembered as a skilled and caring nurse during the horrors of the Crimean War, what is often ignored is that it was her methodical record keeping and statistical analysis of what actions worked, and what did not, that made her so effective in treating the ill and wounded.

However applying statistics to social issues did cause much disquiet. The Church of England for example questioned what relevance national statistics could have to an individual's propensity to sin, and why crime rates remained so constant across the country despite God-given free will and the church's own evangelising efforts. The use of statistical analysis was also strongly opposed by social reformers. Charles Dickens in particular regarded statistics with deep suspicion, even going so far as to call it "a great evil". He objected to Quetelet's famous concept of "the average man" because he feared governments would be able to use it to say that people were better off now (on the average) even though the poor (lost in the tails of the statistical bell curve) were poorer than ever and their workplaces increasingly hazardous. Similarly he feared business owners would cut the lowest-paid jobs and so reduce the workforce in order to increase overall average productivity, whilst being able to justify their actions by saying the average wage had increased. Dickens publically expressed his belief that Parliament had deliberately used statistics as a population metric to dehumanize the workforce and to block more progressive social legislation in both the 1834 Poor Law and the 1844 Factories Act. He also feared politicians regarded individual misery and criminal behaviour as statistically pre-determined and so unavoidable, thus allowing them to ignore pleas to improve social conditions.

Several of Dickens' novels touch on the deep antagonism he had for statistics but one in particular, 'Hard Times', published in 1854, is fashioned around it. In the novel Thomas Gradgrind, a school board Superintendent, is a man who wanted only facts and figures, who stood ready "to measure any parcel of human nature and tell you exactly what it comes to". Even his pupils were reduced to numbers. However this attitude led to despair in his own life and that of his daughter Louisa, who was forced to marry, not where her love inclines, but where her father judges the "statistics of marriage" unambiguously point her. The end result of his single-minded philosophy was misery for all.

So while we now readily accept concepts such as the average man with his average life expectancy and his average two-and-a-half children; and understand that if the murder rate is 20 per million population it doesn't imply that, if by November there have been only 15 homicides then December should inevitably see five more; nevertheless it was only 150 years ago that statisticians were often regarded as evil just for applying mathematics to numerical data.

Regarding the phrase, "lies, damned lies and statistics", it is interesting that there was a report in the 'Manchester Guardian' of 1892 (so pre-dating Mark Twain's first use of it in the 'North American Review' in 1907) of a political speech by Arthur James Balfour (Chief Secretary of State for Ireland, 1887-1891). Balfour used the phrase exactly as it might be used today to accuse a political opponent of deliberately manipulating statistics by failing to note a changing denominator - rather than suggesting the statistics themselves are in anyway untrustworthy or that the statistician who had complied them had any ulterior motive or evil intent. The punctuation, at least as reported by the newspaper, also suggests that Balfour was making a clear distinction between lies and damned lies - and honest statistics.

But the improvement in Ireland from 1886 to 1892 was an inconvenient fact, and therefore the Gladstonians set themselves to work to prove that the fact was no fact at all. … There were certain propositions so obvious to every man who knew the facts that it was in vain to parade, he would not say cooked statistics, for that would be offensive, but manipulated statistics, before the eyes of any audience in the country.—(Hear, hear.) Professor Munro reminded him of an old saying which he rather reluctantly proposed, in that company, to repeat. It was to the effect that there were three gradations of inveracity—there were lies, there were d—d lies, and there were statistics.

The average receipts, said Mr. Munro, from passengers during the years 1881 to 1885, when Mr. Gladstone was in office, were 1,098 per mile, while the average receipts between the years 1886–90, when Mr. Balfour was in office, were only 1,092 per mile, showing a decrease of 6 per mile. [However] ... There had been a great extension of light railways in Ireland, and the result had ... the effect, of course, of gradually increasing … the number of miles over which the average traffic receipts had to be calculated.

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

I may be one of the evil ones: I once answered the door to a couple who asked me if I believed in God. My reply was, No I believe in mathematics.