Day 2
Even though the main focus of the conference was directed towards the links between mathematics and British culture, we also had time to look "Beyond Britain" in the first panel of the second conference day. Henrik Kragh Sørensen (Aarhus University) started the morning with an illuminating paper about the Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel and the appropriation and re-imagination of his image as a romantic national hero. The second paper in this panel was presented by Łukasz Matuszyk (Uniwersytet Śląski). He introduced the audience to "liberature", a recent form of Polish literature which allows for the depiction of space based on mathematical principles.
The second keynote of the conference was delivered by Michele Emmer (University of Rome "La Sapienza"). In his talk he focused on the representation of mathematicians in novels, theatre and film of the twentieth and twenty-first century and concluded that mathematicians in film are either mad, bad or dangerous.
The second panel of the day investigated literary excursions into geometry. Moritz Ingwersen (Trent University) turned his attention to non-Euclidean geometry as he pondered the seemingly impossible spaces in the recent US-American novel House of Leaves which is also reminiscent of the imaginary worlds found in the artistic works of M.C. Escher. In contrast, Wolfgang Funk (Leibniz University) analyzed the Victorian satire Flatland that uses Euclidean geometry to criticize then contemporary views of the roles of women, evolutionary theory and the British class system.
In the third panel of the day order and chaos were pitched against each other. Valerie Allen (City University of New York) traced the introduction of Arab numerals into Western culture by way of didactic manuals that described in which order and directions these new numbers had to be written down and read. Who would have thought that writing something as simple as "9346" required a good page of written instructions. Johanna Grabow (Leipzig University) then rejected the ordered world of numbering and instead traced the appropriation of chaos theory for the postmodern novel. With the examples of To Say Nothing of the Dog and The Difference Engine, she illustrated that deterministic chaos may equally pose a threat as well as allow for positive outlooks.
The final panel of the day and of the conference was dedicated to investigations of the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times. Margaret Kolb (University of California Berkeley) argued that in this novel Dickens rejects the inhumanity of cold statistics and, instead, labours for the recovery of history. In contrast, Sheelagh Russell-Brown (Saint Mary's University, Halifax) investigated the mathematical, statistical and utilitarian imagery of the novel and rooted it in its historical context of mid-Victorian Britain and argued that Dickens's portrayal of statistics and utilitarianism is lacking in fact in order to provide his readers with easy entertainment.
As organisers, we would like to thank our speakers for their illuminating papers. Over the cause of two days, the nineteen speakers from eight different countries and as many academic disciplines investigated such diverse topics as music, sports, gambling, architecture, the fine arts, literature, biography and philosophy in Britain since the Middle Age. What united these different topics and the different analytical approaches was mathematics as ordering principle and common denominator.
