but correctly to six, but when Isaac Newton (1642–1727), an Englishman, was a mathe-

it came to the seventh grain matician, a physicist, an astronomer, a coinventor of calculus,

and the eighth, they grew
tense and uneasy, at first
yawning and complaining of a
headache, then finally avoided
the question altogether or sim-
ply walked off.” Perhaps seven
means “many” in such com-
mon phrases as “seven seas”
and “seven deadly sins.”
(These interesting facts come
from Adrian Room, The Guin-
ness Book of Numbers, 1989.)
and famous for his law of gravitation. He was also the author
of many books on biblical subjects, especially prophecy.
Perhaps less well known is the fact that Newton was a cre-
ationist who wanted to be known as much for his theological
writings as for his scientific and mathematical texts. Newton
believed in a Christian unity, as opposed to a trinity. He devel-
oped calculus as a means of describing motion, and perhaps
for understanding the nature of God through a clearer under-
standing of nature and reality. He respected the Bible and
accepted its account of Creation.

Genius and eccentricity. James Hopwood Jeans

Carl Friedrich Gauss
(1777–1855), a German, was
a mathematician, an
astronomer, and a physicist
with a wide range of contri-
butions. Like Ramanujan,
after Gauss proved a theorem,
he sometimes said that the
insight did not come from
“painful effort but, so to
speak, by the grace of God.”
He also once wrote, “There
are problems to whose solu-
tion I would attach an infi-
nitely greater importance
than to those of mathematics,
for example, touching ethics,
or our relation to God, or
concerning our destiny and
our future; but their solution
lies wholly beyond us and
completely outside the
province of science.”
“The amount of eccentricity
in a society has been propor-
tional to the amount of
genius, material vigor and
moral courage which it con-
tains” (John Stuart Mill, On
Liberty, 1869).
Mathematics and God. “The
Christians know that the math-
ematical principles, according
to which the corporeal world
was to be created, are co-
eternal with God. Geometry
has supplied God with the
models for the creation of the
world. Within the image of
God it has passed into man,
and was certainly not received
within through the eyes”
(Johannes Kepler, The
Harmony of the World, 1619).
(1877–1946) was an applied
mathematician, a physicist,
and an astronomer. He some-
times likened God to a math-
ematician and wrote in The
Mysterious Universe (1930),
“From the intrinsic evidence
of his creation, the Great
Architect of the Universe
now begins to appear as a
pure mathematician.” He has
also written, “Physics tries to
discover the pattern of events
which controls the phenom-
ena we observe. But we can
never know what this pattern
means or how it originates;
and even if some superior
intelligence were to tell us,
we should find the explana-
tion unintelligible” (Physics
and Philosophy, 1942).

Numbers, History, Society, and People 17