We pause in the narrative of wonderful Wellsian things for a brain shift: a class from Oxford University Deapartment for Continuing Education offered by the British Society for the History of Mathematics. I had been to a similar class of theirs last year, in the same location at Rewley House, and really enjoyed it. Although somewhat like American extension classes, these are at a higher level, more like a conference. The room is full of Society members, mathematicians, and historians (note use of Oxford comma there). Last year I met the curator of the History of Science museum, for example.
The topic/title was “Picturing Mathematics”, but of course it’s really about history, so all papers were presented in chronological order. The class began with some issues (no coffee, no soap in the ladies’, computer problems) but really was fine. Some Notes, Part I:
Professor Jeanne Peiffer: The painter’s eyes in Albrecht Dürer’s geometrical diagram
An analysis of Dürer’s diagrams and methods from his Manual of Measurement (1525), focusing on the combination of practical use (for artists and craftsmen) and mathematics. For me, the most interesting aspect was that the book as “written for the young and for those who lack a devoted instructor”, those who have nobody to train them. Dürer said you didn’t even need his book if you already knew Euclid. Although not a theme of the conference, I would notice throughout the day how many marvelous diagrams and images have been created in order to teach them to students.
As part of his textbook (it really is a textbook) Dürer wanted the images in juxtaposition to explanatory text. This I have previously blogged about as being terribly important in online learning – proximity of image to text is crucial. In his introduction, Dürer wrote that the text and images must correspond because “the inner understanding is demonstrated by external exposition”. He wrote, “[a]nd for this reason I shall draw all things described in this book next to their explanations…” Nice to be in agreement with an artist and scholar from the 16th century. It’s the historian’s creed: Nothing is New.
Professor Hugh Small: Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams
This was the topic that first attracted me to the class, since I have a strong interest in the history of medicine during the Victorian era (and am considering writing a mystery novel based on that interest). Professor Small’s book is now on my must-buy list. A primary focus was on the development and use of this graphic, which Florence Nightingale created in her push for sanitation reform:
The first fascinating thing about the chart is that today we interpret it wrongly. Although it certainly shows that the amount of deaths due to disease during the Crimean War vastly exceeded the number of deaths due to war wounds, this was not the point Nightingale was trying to make. No Victorians, apparently, would have been surprised by this — death by disease in war-time had always exceeded deaths in battle.
Now that I know Professor Small is also trained in psychology, I understand how he was able to so clearly explain how graphics are interpreted: we see what surprises us. This is apparently because our visual acumen has developed for much longer in humans than our verbal acumen. When we hear something, we tend to listen for what we expect, but visually we are trained to look for things that are out of place.
So what Nightingale was trying to do, and what Victorian people would have seen, was the decline in death by disease when comparing the first (larger image) and second years of the war. What she was showing was that disease could be reduced and prevented. This was important because the elite medical community, which dominated policy in the Privy Council, had been demanding more public support to make scientific discoveries, while the trend toward public sanitation (championed by Edwin Chadwick in the 1840s) had gone out of fashion (the main board for public health had been dismantled in the 1850s). Nightingale, for example, campaigned for landlords to have to pay to hook up all houses to the new sewer systems in London.
The design of the chart is important . The statistics could just have been listed, but the spiral makes you focus differently on the information. Here it is as a bar chart:
Professor Small pointed out that it’s hard to see the difference in years, and the blue deaths are overemphasized – it looks like a chart showing things were bad that first winter (which they were, but that wasn’t her point).
She was good at this. Another of her charts he sees as “poetic” (and possible written by a poet), repeating information to get the point across that so many soldiers were dying of preventable diseases right there in the UK due to poor conditions in the barracks:
The deaths are divided by age for no particular reason – the percentage is about the same in each. But the comparison of deaths of “Englishmen” in general to “English Soldiers”, repeated over and over, hammers home the point.
In 1867, the Reform Act would vastly expand the franchise, and would end the domination of landed interests and the elite medical community, making many of her goals possible.
