University Of Cambridge Faculty

"A Chinese poem is at best a hard nut to crack."

"Flowers fade and fly, and flying fill the sky; Their bloom departs, their perfume gone, yet who stands pitying by? ... Oh, let me sadly bury them beside these steps to-night! ... Farewell, dear flowers, for ever now, thus buried as 'twas best, I have not yet divined when I with you shall sink to rest. I who can bury flowers like this a laughing-stock shall be; I cannot say in days to come what hands shall bury me. See how when spring begins to fail each opening floweret fades; So too there is a time of age and death for beauteous maids; And when the fleeting spring is gone, and days of beauty o'er, Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die, and both are known no more."

"It was on his return journey that Pao-yü's father heard of the success and disappearance of his son. Torn by conflicting emotions he hurried on, in his haste to reach home and aid in unravelling the secret of Pao-yü's hiding-place. One moonlight night, his boat lay anchored alongside the shore, which a storm of the previous day had wrapped in a mantle of snow. He was sitting writing at a table, when suddenly, through the half-open door, advancing towards him over the bow of the boat, his silhouette sharply defined against the surrounding snow, he saw the figure of a shaven-headed Buddhist priest. The priest knelt down, and struck his head four times upon the ground, and then, without a word, turned back to join two other priests who were awaiting him. The three vanished as imperceptibly as they had come; before, indeed, the astonished father was able to realise that he had been, for the last time, face to face with Pao-yü!"

"It must however always be borne in mind that translators are but traitors at the best, and that translations may be moonlight and water while the originals are sunlight and wine."

"Dear Land of Flowers, forgive me!—that I took These snatches from thy glittering wealth of song, And twisted to the uses of a book Strains that to alien harps can ne'er belong.Thy gems shine purer in their native bed Concealed, beyond the pry of vulgar eyes; And there, through labyrinths of language led, The patient student grasps the glowing prize.Yet many, in their race toward other goals, May joy to feel, albeit at second-hand, Some far faint heart-throb of poetic souls Whose breath makes incense in the Flowery Land."

"During the four hundred years of Han supremacy the march of civilization went steadily forward. Paper and ink were invented, and also the camel's-hair brush, both of which gave a great impetus to the arts of writing and painting."

"Even though total membership of the Nazi Students’ League did not even reach 10 per cent of national fraternity membership, the Nazis had completely taken over student representation in Germany. Impress by such numbers, Hitler appointed Schirach to the leadership of the Hitler Youth on 3 October 1931."

"Not just women, young people, students, and school pupils, but also many other sectors of German society were catered for by specially designed Nazi organizations by the end of the 1920s. There were groups for civil servants, for the war-wounded, for farmers, and for many other constituencies, each addressing its particular, specifically targeted propaganda effort. There was even a kind of trade union movement, the clumsily names National Socialist Cell Organizations [NSBO]."

"Among those who were sent to receive political indoctrination in June 1919 was a 30-year-old corporal who had been in the Bavarian army since the beginning of the war and had stayed in it through all the vicissitudes of Social Democracy, anarchy and Communism, taking part in demonstrations, wearing a red armband along with the rest of his comrades, and disappearing from the scene with most of them when they had been ordered to defend Munich against the invading forces in the proceeding weeks. His name was Adolf Hitler."

"The National Socialist German Students’League… gained a reputation for provocative actions, and campaigned on issues such as the reduction of overcrowding in lectures (by imposing a limit on the number of Jewish students), the dismissal of pacifist professors, the creation of new chairs in the subjects like Racial Studies and Military Science, and the harnessing of the universities to the national interest, away from the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself."

"The widespread intimidation of the population provided the essential precondition for a process that was in train all over Germany in the period from February to July 1933… The Nazi takeover of the federated states provided a key component in this process… At the same time as the state governments were being overthrown, local Nazis, backed by squads of armed stormtroopers and SS men, were occupying town halls, terrorizing mayors and councils into resigning, and replacing them with their own nominees."

"The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket."

"Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights."

"There were even more disturbing reports of children whose membership in the Hitler Youth was disapproved of by their parents threatening to report them to the authorities if they tried to stop them going to meetings. For adolescents, it was only too easy to annoy parents who were former Social Democrats by greeting them at home with ‘Hail, Hitler!’ instead of ‘good morning’. ‘Thus war is taken into every family’, one wife of an old labour movement activist observed. ‘The worst is’, she added apprehensively, ‘that you’ve got to watch yourself in front of your own children.’"

"For all their deficiencies, the Hitler Youth movement and the increasingly Nazified school system were driving a wedge between parents who still retained some loyalty to the beliefs and standards they had grown up in themselves, and their children who were being indoctrinated at every stage of their lives. As one such agent ruefully observed: ‘It is extremely difficult for parents who are opponents of the Nazis to exercise an influence on their children. Either they ask the child not to talk at school about what is said at home. Then the children get the feeling, aha, the parents have to hide what they think. The teacher permits himself to say everything out loud. So he’s bound to be right. - Or the parents express their opinion without giving the child a warning. Then it’s not long before they are arrested or at the very least called up before the teacher, who shouts at them and threatens to report them. - ‘Send your father to the school!’ That is the normal answer to suspicious doubts and questions on the part of the child. If the father is quiet after such a visit, then he gives the child the impression that he has been convinced by what the teacher has told him, and the effect is far worse than if nothing had ever been said.’"

"Yet the Nazi Students’ League was not without competition in the student world at this time. Many students joined the stormtroopers in the spring of 1933, and following Hitler’s instruction in September 1933 that the task of politicizing the student body was to be undertaken by the SA, the brownshirts set up their own centres in the universities and put pressure on students to join. By the end of the year, over half of the students at Heidelberg university, for example, had enrolled as stormtroopers."

"Like the Hitler Youth in the schools, the Nazi Students’ League and its members did not fight sly of naming and shaming the teachers they thought were not toeing the Nazi line. In 1937 a Hamburg professor complained that no student meeting had been held in the previous few years ‘in which the professoriate has not been dismissed in contemptuous terms as an ‘ossified’ society that is not fit to educate or lead you people in the universities.’"

"In a two-hour monologue before assembled Nazi dignitaries on 15 June 1935 the Leader made it clear that he expected the fraternities to wither away in the Nazi state as remnants of a bygone aristocratic age. In May 1936 Hitler and Hess openly condemned the fraternities and barred Party members from belonging to them."

"Early in 1934 the Interior Ministry made military training organized by the brownshirts compulsory for male students. Soon they were spending long hours training with the SA. This has a serious effect on their studies. University authorities began to note a drastic fall in academic standards as students spent days or even weeks away from their studies, or appeared at lectures in a state of exhaustion after training all night."

"Hitler insisted that political education was a matter for the Party and not for state-run institutions or state-appointed teachers… All the staff had to undergo regular special training, and the students also had to spend time several weeks a year working on a farm or a factory to maintain contacts with the people."

"At every level, formal learning was given decreased emphasis… By 1939 employers were complaining that school graduates’ standards of knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor and that ‘the level of school knowledge of the examinees had been sinking for some time.’ Yet this did not cause any concern to the regime. As Hans Schemm, the leader of the Nazi Teachers’ League up to 1935, declared: ‘The goal of our education is the formation of character’, and he complained that too much knowledge had been crammed into children, to the detriment of character-building."

"The Hitler Youth proved a thoroughly disruptive influence on formal education. ‘School’, one Social Democratic report already noted in 1934, ‘is constantly disrupted by Hitler Youth events.’ Teachers had to allow pupils time off for them almost every week… Despite the military-style discipline in the schools, there were numerous reports of indiscipline and disorder, violent incidents between pupils, and insubordination towards teachers. ‘One can’t speak of the teacher having authority any more,’ noted one Social Democratic agent in 1937. ‘The snotty-nosed little brats of the Hitler Youth decide what goes on at school, they’re in charge.’"

"Conway made a fortuitous match for a Ph.D. adviser in Harold Davenport, considered the leader of the internationally respected British school of number theory. And while politically and socially speaking Conway was a radical, Davenport was a conservative. “All changes are for the worse,” he'd say. And looking back upon his career and his charges, he said: “I had 2 very good students. Baker”—Alan Baker, later a Fields Medalist—“to whom I would give a problem and he would return with a very good solution. And Conway, to whom I would give a problem and he would return with a very good solution to another problem.”"

"Mathematicians are extremely lucky, they are paid for doing what they would by nature have to do anyway. One should not have a non-teaching fellowship too long, there comes a time when one must make a contribution to society. Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem."

"The last thirty years [1925 to 1955] have seen an enormous improvement in the position of geometry as a branch of mathematics, or, rather, have seen the re-integration of geometry into the main fabric of mathematics. Indeed, one can go further and say that with the restoration of geometry to its rightful place in the mathematical scheme the process of fragmentation which had been doing so much harm to mathematics has been reversed, and we may look forward to the day in which there are no longer analysts, algebraists, geometers and so on, but simply mathematicians. Mathematical research has two aspects, motivation and technique, and when the latter gains control the result is apt to be excessive specialisation. The revolution of geometrical thought, and the reinstatement of geometry as one of the major mathematical disciplines, have helped to bring about a unification of mathematics which we may justly regard as one of the major contributions of the last quarter century to the subject."

"Hodge's work was in the great tradition of Riemann and Poincaré but his more immediate inspiration came from the work of Lefschetz, for whom he had a tremendous admiration."

"Skidelsky tells us Keynes was also practical, absorbed in questions of economic policy, argumentative, benevolent and intolerant, often rude, and had an intellectual arrogance that would allow positions previously held with great passion to be calmly abandoned. Well, that is exactly what the Cambridge faculty was like in the 1960s. Not only did the ghost of Keynes dominate the content of economics education at Cambridge, it also dominated the style. That style could be sustained with substance only by the extraordinarily gifted. So it is not surprising that the Cambridge faculty, although still very "Keynesian," looks much more conventional these days."

"Though he died in 1946, Keynes still dominated economics at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. It wasn't just that all the leading figures among the faculty, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Brian Reddaway, David Champernowne, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, had been his pupils and/or collaborators. It was the tone of the place. The study of economics, theoretical or empirical, was driven by the desire to improve the conduct of economic policy. This did not mean that pure theory was neglected. Indeed, in those years Robinson was fighting a stirring battle in the realms of high theory with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nor was Cambridge innocent of the cutting edge of econometric technique. Richard Stone, who, following Keynes's suggestions, had created the first modern national income accounts, was still director of the Department of Applied Economics where much of modern econometrics was pioneered. Nonetheless, we were taught that theory and technique should serve the higher cause of rational economic policies, and to use our newly learned econometric expertise to write essays on unemployment, or inflation, or the balance of trade, or some other topic at the top of the current political agenda."

"I wish I could communicate to you, and especially to those of you who are just now beginning your professional careers in a world of statistics incredibly more sophisticated than that of Karl Pearson's day, something of the thrill in meeting in person and studying under a man of Pearson's immense reputation. Author of the Grammar of Science, perfector of simple linear correlations; inventor of multiple and partial correlation, of curvilinear correlation, of tetrachoric and bi- serial correlation; discoverer of the \chi^2 function for summarizing multinomial data with magnificent simplicity; builder of a beautiful system of frequency curves derived from a single differential equation which in turn harked back to the hypergeometric series; founder of ' and author or co-author of a prolific literature applying these new statistics to biological and sociological data - Karl Pearson was a hero of to an American boy vouchsafed a visit to the home of the gods. Indeed, Pearson was Thor himself - for the thunderbolts with which he attacked unsparingly those who dared oppose him were echoing and reechoing."

"It was Karl Pearson, a man with an unquenchable ambition for scholarly recognition and the kind of drive and determination that had taken Hannibal over the Alps and Marco Polo to China, who recognized the power in Edgeworth's formulations of Galton's ideas. Pearson lacked Galton's originality and Edgeworth's depth of understanding, but it was his zeal, with a vital assist from G. Udny Yule, that created the methodology and sold it to the world."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness (...in reality, deviation from normality ...for all intents and purposes, the same thing). He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel) during... July 1902... He discovered... with a high degree of statistical significance... the runs were not purely random. ...Pearson was greatly surprised ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Professor Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random!...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ..."

"During the first two terms of 1881 he deputised for W. H. Drew, Professor of Mathematics at King's College, London, taking the senior mathematical teaching. It was in 1882... that he was engaged in his first considerable piece of mathematical work, according to his friend W. H. Macaulay "a theory of pulsating spheres in a fluid, forming an Atomic Theory,... a thing in spherical harmonics of the Clerk-Maxwell type." This work, or part of it, was probably not published till 1887. In 1883 two papers were printed "On the Motion of Spherical and Ellipsoidal Bodies in Fluid Media", and another "Note on Twists in an Infinite Elastic Solid". It was a natural step from such research to the completion of Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity. We see from the subject-matter of these papers how Pearson's mind was already at work puzzling over the laws of the physical universe, which in terms of the Grammar of Science describe the "how" rather than the "why.""

"[T]his work is not written to gain a public, but piam memoriam prodere conditoris nostri and is intended especially for those who have known and loved Francis Galton in the past, or who may in the future desire to understand and honour him."

"The statistician Karl Pearson analyzed a large number of outcomes at certain roulette tables and suggested that the wheels were biased. He wrote in 1894: Clearly, since the Casino does not serve the valuable end of huge laboratory for the preparation of probability statistics, it has no scientific raison d’être... [E]arly experiments were suggestive and led to important discoveries in probability and statistics. They led Pearson to the ', which is of great importance in testing whether observed data fit a given ."

"Before meeting with Weldon... Pearson had grown into a social Darwinist anxious to provide his particular form of Darwinism with a proper scientific basis, and to show that Darwin's ideas and socialism were complementary, and not opposed, as had been maintained by several leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Biometry offered him the chance of pursuing these ends. Moreover... Pearson's conception of 'properly scientific'... was one that made it probable that the development of biometry... would yield a harvest of statistical methods. Statistics, thus formed, embodied the central tenets of Pearson's philosophy of science, and, as such, was to be universally recommended."

"[O]nly little by little, slowly... man, by the aid of organised observation and careful reasoning, can hope to reach knowledge of the truth... science... is the sole gateway to a knowledge which can harmonise with our past as well as with our... future... As Clifford puts it, "Scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.""

"Step by step [aesthetic] judgment, restless under the growth of positive knowledge, has discarded creed after creed and philosophic system after philosophic system."

"It was only the feeling that, at least in one or two aspects of Francis Galton's later life and of his scientific work, I could perhaps put his contributions to human knowledge more adequately than possibly one or another who might take up the task, if I resigned it, and who would hardly grasp the bearing of that long and intimate scientific correspondence between Galton, Weldon and myself, that I persevered in my endeavour to give some account of a life, wherein an important chapter of personal development must remain largely unrecorded."

"[T]he laws of science are products of the human mind rather than factors of the external world."

"[I]t is better to be content with the fraction of a right solution than to beguile ourselves with the whole of a wrong solution."

"[I]t was soon clear to me that I was collecting as much information bearing on the family history of Charles Darwin as on that of Francis Galton. It seemed desirable to place the two men to some extent in contrast in my volume, showing in ancestry, in methods of work and in outlook on life what they had in common and how they differed."

"Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured."

"If my view be correct, Erasmus Darwin planted the seed of suggestion in questioning whether adaptation meant no more to man than illustration of creative ingenuity; the one grandson, Charles Darwin, collected the facts which had to be dealt with and linked them together by wide-reaching hypotheses; the other grandson, Francis Galton, provided the methods by which they could be tested..."

"The purpose of the mathematical theory of statistics is to deal with the relationship between 2 or more variable quantities without assuming that one is a single-valued mathematical function of the rest. The statistician does not think a certain x will produce a single-valued y; not a causative relation but a correlation. The relationship between x and y will be somewhere within a zone and we have to work out the probability that the point (x,y) will lie in different parts of that zone. The physicist is limited and shrinks the zone into a line. Our treatment will fit all the vagueness of biology, sociology, etc. A very wide science."

"Those who know the real history of the one occasion on which Galton and Darwin disagreed know how loyal Galton was to Darwin—loyal with a loyalty far rarer to-day. Galton would not have wished me to put him in the same rank as his master, but the reader who follows my story to the end may possibly see that the ramifications of Galton's methods are producing a renascence in innumerable branches of science..."

"[M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?"

"I simply assert that the universe alters, is "becoming;" what it is becoming I will not venture to say. ...the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming." These alterations... I shall—merely for convenience—term life."

"[T]his work... is intended fundamentally as a permanent memorial to the Founder of the , and embraces material which may easily perish or be ultimately lost sight of. ...My object is... to issue a volume to some extent worthy of the name of the man it bears,—which may be studied hereafter by those who wish to understand him, his origin and his aims..."

"[W]e are frequently told that the growth of science is destroying the beauty and poetry of life. It is undoubtedly rendering many of the old interpretations of life meaningless, because it demonstrates that they are false to the facts which they profess to describe. It does not follow from this, however, that the aesthetic and scientific judgments are opposed; the fact is, that with the growth of our scientific knowledge the basis of the aesthetic judgment is changing and must change. There is more real beauty [satisfaction,.. permanent delight] in what science has to tell us of the chemistry of a distant star, or in the life history of a protozoon than in any produced by the creative imagination of a pre-scientific age."