"The difficulty of understanding why it should have been the Hindus who took this step, why it was not taken by the mathematicians of antiquity, why it should first have been taken by practical man, is only insuperable if we seek for the explanation of intellectual progress in the genius of a few gifted individuals, instead of in the whole social framework of custom thought which circumscribes the greatest individual genius. What happened in India about AD 100 had happened before. May be it is happening now in Soviet Russia…. To accept it (this truth) is to recognise that every culture contains within itself its own doom, unless it pays as much attention to the education of the mass of mankind as to the education of the exceptionally gifted people.’"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Hogben: ‘Mathematics for the Million’ (London, 1942), p. 285.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lancelot_Hogben
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Lancelot Hogben
Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician.
6 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Lancelot Hogben →
Related Quotes
"This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democrac…"
"‘The change did not come about without obstruction from the representatives of custom thought. An edict of A.D. 1259 …"
"All the algorithms for fractions now used were invented by the Hindus. The Greek treatment of fractions never advance…"
"In the whole history of Mathematics, there has been no more revolutionary step than the one which the Indian made whe…"
"Άγιος που δε θαυματουργεί, μηδέ δοξολογιέται."
"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"
"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"
"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"
"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens…"
"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse…"