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Calculation - Thinking - Computational Thinking Seventeenth-Century Perspectives on Computational Science

Michael S. Mahoney Princeton University
Published in Folkerts, Menso; Seising, Rudolf (Hg.): Form, Zahl, Ordnung. Studien zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte. Ivo Schneider zum 65. Geburtstag (Boethius: Texte und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003.

Festschriften allow one to begin on a personal note. Over thirty years ago I had the pleasure of daily conversations with Ivo Schneider during a year's sabbatical at the Institut fr Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften in Munich. We resumed those conversations two years later when Ivo spent a year as visiting professor at Princeton. At the time, we shared a focus on mathematics and the mathematical sciences in the 16th and 17th centuries, and our long talks, often on the way to and from the coffee shop, gave me an opportunity to sound out my ideas with a knowledgeable, imaginative, and articulate colleague. Each of us has since moved off into other areas, in my case to the history of computing since 1945. Yet those conversations remain pertinent. For, the two subjects are not as far apart as they might seem at first glance. They both involve the emergence of new disciplines, or of new ways of thinking about old disciplines: in the 17th century, symbolic algebra and the new mode of analytical reasoning that it fostered; more recently, theoretical computer science as a mathematical discipline. On the one hand, the two subjects display considerable continuity of theme. Theoretical computer science has drawn its mathematical structure from developments in abstract algebra that in turn exemplify many of the themes that informed the first efforts in symbolic algebra in the 17th century. In that sense, this essay completes a circle that I opened up during that year in Munich with a lecture on "Die Anfnge der algebraischen Denkweise im 17. Jahrhundert."(1) It may complete it in another sense as well, namely by marking the end of algebraic thought as it was conceived in the 17th century, at least as far as it was thought to capture the relation of mathematics to the world. Let me start, then, with a brief account of the emergence of a new mathematical world in the 17th century and then jump to the new world of mathematics being created by means of the computer, of which we have only limited mathematical understanding.
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1. Published under that title in the short-lived but important journal founded by Schneider and Eberhard Schmauderer, Rete: Strukturgeschichte der Naturwissenschaften 1,1(1971), 15-31; English trans., "The Beginnings of Algebraic Thought in the 17th Century", in S. Gaukroger (ed.), Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics (Sussex: The Harvester Press/Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980), Chap.5. Among the topics on our daily walks was the question of "structural history" and Ivo's plans for a journal devoted to it.

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I. Cutting the World Up and Putting it Back Together with Mathematics

Toward the close of the 16th century, the French lawyer and mathematician Franois Vite created a new symbolic algebra, or "logistic of species", designed to extend the heuristic power of algebra from arithmetic to mathematics in general and thereby to provide a new tool for carrying out the form of mathematical reasoning which the Greeks had called "analysis". He called his new algebra the "analytic art" (or "art of analysis").(2) Essentially, it went beyond the old algebra by using symbols to denote both knowns and unknowns (his convention was to use vowels for unknowns and consonants for knowns; Descartes chose to work from opposite ends of the alphabet) and thus to separate the form of the relationship among knowns and unknowns from any particular values, indeed from any particular kind of quantity, that they might represent. That is, an equation expressed a relationship among things that could be added to one another, subtracted from one another, and so on. What interested Vite and his successors was not so much the solution of an equation as the structure of the relation that it expressed. The main task of his ars analytica, which distinguished it from all previous algebras, was the investigation of the constitutio aequationum, i.e. the structure of equations: how they are constituted and how they are related to one another. In a series of treatises Vite set forth techniques for the analysis and transformation of equations. He thus established the prototype, in essence if not in historical fact, for Book III of Descartes' Gomtrie, that misnamed treatise on the theory of equations, where Descartes showed just how an nth-degree polynomial is the product of n linear binomials, how the coefficients of the polynomial are the result of combinations of the roots, and thus not only how terms can be removed by reducing or augmenting the roots but also how one might imagine roots that do not correspond to real numbers, although structurally they must be there. xn + a1 xn-1 + ... + an = (x - r1 )(x - r2 )...(x - rn) a1 = -(r1 + r2 + ... + rn), etc. x3 - 1 = (x - 1)(x - a)(x - b); a = ?, b = ? In short, the new symbolism and its associated techniques enabled one to talk about equations and the number and nature of their solutions, even without solving them. In retrospect and put anachronistically, Vite's analytic art was a language of metamathematics as well as mathematics. As such, it gave rise to three lines of development of interest to the matter at hand. First, as already noted, it made symbolic algebra the study of the abstract structures of mathematics. Second, in providing a language for
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2. Franois Vite, In artem analyticen isagoge (Tours, 1591; republ. in Opera , ed. F. van Schooten, Leiden, 1646)

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talking about mathematical reasoning, it became a model for talking about reasoning in general, that is, it suggested a form of symbolic logic by which reasoning could be viewed as a kind of calculation. Third, it stimulated a program of mathematical research that extended the heuristic power of algebra into new realms and made the analytic art the language of mathematical science. Let me begin with the last point and then return later to the first two. In his work, Vite set out an agenda which I have termed the "analytic program" and which called for the application of his art to the works cited in Book VII of Pappus of Alexandria's Mathematical Collection as constituting the field of analysis, or as Newton happily phrased it, the "Treasury of Analysis". The algebraic geometries devised by Descartes and Fermat addressed this agenda, as did Fermat's new methods of maxima and minima and of tangents. In the latter case, the application of the art carried symbolic algebra into the realm of the indefinitely small, or infinitesimal, and linked it, in ways not pertinent to the current discussion, to independent efforts at recapturing the techniques of quadrature, or the determination of the area of curved figures, associated with the name of Archimedes. Methods of tangents and techniques of quadrature developed alongside one another through much of the 17th century, in many cases without reference to algebra.(3) As is well known, it was the signal achievement of Newton and Leibniz to establish the inverse relationship between them. Both did so in the language of symbolic algebra, and Leibniz in particular signaled the importance of the symbolism. The 'd' was to be construed as an operation on the quantity to which it was prefixed. Differentiation constituted a "certain modification" (quaedam modificatio) of a quantity, and the rules governing that modification gave rise to a new realm of structures to be analyzed.(4) Although the calculus was not created for the sake of doing mechanics, it was set to assume that role at the time Newton's Principia appeared. It is, of course, ironic that analytic mechanics was couched in the terms of Leibniz's calculus rather than Newton's own fluxions, but the translation into algebraic terms involved more than symbolism. In keeping with the heuristic goals that had motivated Vite in the first place, Euler pointed to the difficulty posed by Newton's geometrical original: Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, by which the science of motion has gained its greatest increases, is written in a style not much unlike [the synthetic geometrical style of the Ancients]. But what obtains for all writings that are composed without analysis holds most of all for mechanics: even if the reader be convinced of the truth of the things set forth, nevertheless he cannot attain a sufficiently clear and distinct knowledge of them; so that, if the same questions be the slightest bit changed, he may hardly be able to resolve them on his own, unless he himself look to analysis and evolve the same propositions by the analytical method.(5)
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3. For the state of the art just prior to the work of Newton and Leibniz, see my "Barrow's Mathematics: Between Ancients and Moderns", in M. Feingold (ed.), Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chap. 3 4. For more extended discussions on this and what follows, see my "Infinitesimals and Transcendent Relations: The Mathematics of Motion in the Late Seventeenth Century", in D.C. Lindberg and R.S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chap. 12, and "The Mathematical Realm of Nature", in D.E. Garber et al. (eds.), Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Vol. I, pp. 702-55.

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By bringing out the essential structure of problems, algebraic analysis (Euler would consider the phrase redundant) made clear how they and their solutions were related to one another. One could not only do mathematics but could see how the mathematics was done.

5. Mechanica sive motus scientia analytice exposita (St. Petersburg, 1736), Preface, [iv]. 6. "On ne trouvera point de Figures dans cet Ouvrage. Les mthodes que j'y expose ne demandent ni constructions, ni raisonnemens gomtriques ou mcaniques, mais seulement des oprations algbriques, assujetties une marche rgulier et uniforme. Ceux qui aiment l'Analyse, verront avec plaisir la Mcanique en devenir une nouvelle branche, et me sauront gr d'avoir tendu ainsi le domaine." Avertissement.

Euler's point concerned mathematics rather than mechanics, but the two were so wrapped up in one another that in the 18th century analytic mechanics was considered a branch of mathematics rather than of physics. A few decades later, Lagrange took pride in the absence of diagrams from his Mcanique analitique (1788): No drawings are to be found in this work. The methods I set out there require neither constructions nor geometric or mechanical arguments, but only algebraic operations subject to a regular and uniform process. Those who love analysis will take pleasure in seeing mechanics become a new branch of it and will be grateful to me for having thus extended its domain.(6)

The equations of the infinitesimal calculus had become the sole vehicle of mechanics, the unchallenged means of mechanical thought. With the Principia, and especially with its translation into the calculus, the effectiveness of mechanics rested on that of mathematics. Proposition 41 of Book I shows what that means. It is important to grasp the profound implication of the condition in the statement of the problem (NB it is a problem, not a theorem): Assuming any sort of centripetal force, and granting the quadrature of curvilinear figures, required are both the trajectories in which the bodies move and the times of motions in the trajectories found.(7) In this proposition Newton maps the motion of an orbiting body on the left onto a graph of motion at the "atomic" level on the right. The orbit and the position of the body on it at any given time are thus captured mathematically, provided that one can determine the area under the curves abzv and dcxw,
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7. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687), 127. [emphasis added]

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i.e. that one can integrate the equations of motion. As Pierre Varignon put it, after translating Newton's scheme into the two basic "rules", velocity v = ds/dt and force y = (ds/dx )(dds/dt 2), where x is measured along the axis AC from A and s is measured along the curve VIK from V, As to how these two rules are to be used, I say for now that, being given any two of the seven curves noted above [curves relating distance, time, force, and velocity in various combinations], that is to say, the equations of two taken at will, one will always be able to find the five others, supposing the required integrations and the solution of the equations that may be encountered [emphasis added].(8) The condition linked the success of mathematical physics to that of the calculus. It was the job of the calculus to secure those integrations and solutions, and that is where its practitioners directed their efforts over the next centuries. The intellectual satisfaction derived from reductionist explanations depended on the capacity of the mathematics to carry out the integration that provided the reduction, in the sense of showing that the behavior at the reduced level did produce or correspond to the behavior at the observable level. The situation did not change with the shift from central-force physics to other models of physical action. Once couched in the terms of the calculus, the effectiveness of the physical model and its capacity to convey understanding depended on the capacity of the calculus to provide a solution to the differential equations that resulted from analysis. In some cases, it was a matter of calculating, as in expansion into series and term-by-term integration. In other cases, it was a matter of exploiting the power of algebraic analysis to explore structural relationships among problems and thus to determine conditions of solvability or, in some cases, to prove unsolvability, as in the case of the general quintic. Over the course of the eighteenth century, what began as a search for the algorithms that made integration as straightforward and mechanical as differentiation ended in a theory that settled for analysis into families of curves reducible to canonical forms. Despite the successes of analysis, it became increasingly clear that in many cases, for example the n-body problem, the move from differential equation to finite form could be accomplished only by numerical calculation, that is by reducing the analytical expressions to explicit summations iterated over small intervals. One could do that by hand, but it was clearly a job suited more for a machine. The story of the development of mechanical computing devices, both analog and digital, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been recounted many times, and I do not want to retrace that story here.(9) What is important is that, as far as a mathematical understanding of the world is concerned, the turn to mechanical calculation has from the outset been a matter of faute de mieux . A numerical solution may produce
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8. Pierre Varignon, "Du mouvement en gnral par toutes sortes de courbes; & des forces centrales, tant centrifuges que centreptes, ncessaires aux corps qui les dcrivent", Mmoires de l'Acadmie Royale des Sciences (1700), 86.

9. See, for example, William Aspray (ed.), Computing Before Computers (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990).

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from the basic relations specific values to be matched against measurements, but it generally brings very little insight into how those values reflect the working of the underlying relationships. One may, of course, experiment with various initial values and try to discern how the outcome changes, but doing so does not bring insights of the sort provided by relating work to energy by way of force and momentum. Numerical solutions do not reveal how the system works because they hide precisely the intermediate (mediating) relationships that lead from the behavior of the parts to that of the whole. In the seventeenth century, the interactive development of algebra and mechanics led to an analytic view of the world that characterized scientific thought for the next three centuries. The invention of symbolic algebra and its extension into the realm of the infinitesimal ultimately provided a powerful mathematical tool for the study of the world as matter in motion. What made the tool so powerful was that the algebra that lay at its foundation could be used not only to do mathematics but to talk about it as well. Not only could one solve problems using algebra, but one could use the same algebra to analyze questions of solvability. Algebra and the calculus not only captured the world in mathematical structures but also provided the tools for analyzing those structures mathematically. More than simply a means of thinking about mathematics, symbolic algebra was considered a means of thinking about thought itself. Descartes was only the first of a line of thinkers down to the present who have pictured the workings of the mind as a form of calculation, or as Hobbes put it, of ratiocination. Looking toward a universal characteristic, Leibniz foresaw a time when matters of controversy could be resolved by sitting down and calculating. From Boole's Algebra of Thought , through Frege's Begriffsschrift and Russell's and Whitehead's Principia mathematica (the title no coincidence), algebra formed the link between mathematics and logic and thus provided a means of thinking about thought itself. From the outset, algebra was also associated with the notion of a mechanical procedure. Algebra proceeded by straightforward rules, by what Leibniz termed "algorithms", thus giving new and fateful meaning to a word that had been synonymous with reckoning since the 12th century.(10) That is what made it appealing to him as a vehicle of logic: one could move from premisses to conclusions by calculation.(11) Or rather, one could carry out logical analysis in the way one did algebraic analysis: by following the rules of algebra. That is what lay behind the notion of mechanizing logic; it is what lay behind Turing's idea of capturing the notion of computability in an abstract machine.(12)
10. "Algorithm" derived from "algorismus", which in turn was the Latin form of al-Khwarizmi, the author of the first Arabic treatise on calculation with "Indian" numbers, the decimal place-value system. Translated by Robert of Chester in the 12th century, the Liber algoritmi de numero indorum became the basis of a series of textbooks on arithmetic, the most widely read of which was John of Holywood's Algorismus vulgaris (ca. 1220). The word acquired a 'th' in the 17th century by a backformation evidently based on the assumption that the word was originally Greek. 11. "... quando orientur controversiae, non magis disputatione opus erit inter duos philosophos, quam inter duos Computistas. Sufficiet enim calamos in manus sumere sedereque ad abacos, et sibi mutuo (accito si placet amico) dicere: calculemus." Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1890, VII, 200. (I thank Siegfried Probst for locating this source and posting it to the Historia Mathematica list.)

To make the notion of "computable" as clear and simple as possible, Alan Turing proposed in 1936 a mechanical model of what a human does when
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12. On the mechanization of logic, see Sybille Krmer, Symbolische Maschinen:

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computing: We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qR which will be called "mconfigurations". The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol".(13) Turing imagined, then, a tape divided into cells, each containing one of a finite number of symbols. The tape passes through a machine that can read the contents of a cell, write to it, and move the tape one cell in either direction. What the machine does depends on its current state, which includes a signal to read or write, a signal to move the tape right or left, and a shift to the next state. The number of states is finite, and the set of states corresponds to the computation. Since a state may be described in terms of three symbols (read/write, shift right/left, next state), a computation may itself be expressed as a sequence of symbols, which can also be placed on the tape, thus making possible a universal machine that can read a computation and then carry it out by emulating the machine described by it.

Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abri (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988) and Martin Davis, The Universal Machine: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (NY/London: W.W. Norton, 2000). 13. "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser.2, vol. 42(1936), 230265; at 231.

Turing's machine, or rather his monograph, belonged to the then current agenda of mathematical logic. The Entscheidungsproblem stemmed from David Hilbert's program of formalizing mathematics; as stated in the textbook he wrote with W. Ackermann, The Entscheidungsproblem is solved when one knows a procedure by which one can decide in a finite number of operations whether a given logical expression is generally valid or is satisfiable. The solution of the Entscheidungsproblem is of fundamental importance for the theory of all fields, the theorems of which are at all capable of logical development from finitely many axioms.(14)

14. D. Hilbert and W. Ackermann, Grundzge der theoretischen Logik (Berlin: Springer, 1928), 734: Das Entscheidungsproblem ist gelst, wenn man ein Verfahren kennt, das bei einem vorgelegten logischen Ausdruck durch endlich viele Operationen die Entscheidung ber die Allgemeingltigkeit bzw. Erfllbarkeit erlaubt. Die Lsung des Entscheidungsproblems ist fr die Theorie aller Gebiete, deren Stze berhaupt einer logischen Entwickelbarkeit aus endlich vielen Axiomen fhig sind, von grundstzlicher Wichtigkeit.

Turing designed his machine to compute the Entscheidungsproblem, or rather to show that it was uncomputable. Just as he was submitting his paper to the London Mathematical Society, Alonzo Church published an article which anticipated Turing's results by means of a different sort of logical calculus, namely the lambda calculus, and an equivalent notion of "computability", which Church called "effective calculability". With the help
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of W.H.A. Newman, for whose course Turing originally wrote his paper, Turing went to study with Church at Princeton, where he subsequently showed that his machine had the same power as Church's lambda calculus or Stephen Kleene's recursive function theory for determining the range and limitations of axiom systems for mathematics.(15) For the next several years, all these schemes remained abstract devices of metamathematics. For quite independent reasons, the war changed that.

15. Stephen C. Kleene, "Origins of Recursive Function Theory", Annals of the History of Computing 3,1(1981), 52-67

II. Thinking Numerically - Computational Thinking: The Computer

The Harvard Mark I and ENIAC marked the culmination of the development of a mechanical calculator, and the latter marked the turning point to electronic digital computation. John von Neumann first encountered ENIAC in his role as mathematical physicist looking for means of rapid numerical solution of non-linear partial differential equations.(16) But as he talked with ENIAC's creators about the next version of their device, he shifted his focus to a different sets of concerns. In the concept of the stored program he not only saw a means of achieving a working device with the capacity in principle to behave as a Turing machine, but he had a vision also of what that capacity might mean for doing science. By analogy with organisms viewed as natural automata, computers as artificial automata had the potential to grow with the problems they were meant to solve. In particular, he contemplated the conditions under which an automaton could replicate itself. While von Neumann imagined an actual machine floating in a primeval sea of components, his colleague Stanislaw Ulam suggested instead the model of a cellular automaton, that is a two-dimensional array of cells each containing a finite automaton which changes its state as a function of the states of the cells surrounding it. One could then ask about the possible configurations of cells that would be capable of reproducing themselves in the space of the cellular automaton.(17)

16. On von Neumann, see William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 17. Arthur Burks, "Von Neumann's SelfReproducing Automata", in Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory, ed. William Aspray and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press; Los Angeles/San Francisco: Tomash Publishers, 1987), 491-552.

Von Neumann also pointed to a fundamental problem posed by the use of the computer as a means of thinking about the world, and indeed about thinking itself. To the extent that science seeks mathematical understanding, that is understanding that has the certainty and analytical transparency of mathematics, then one needed a mathematical understanding of the computer. As of the early 1950s, no such mathematical theory of the computer existed, and von Neumann could only vaguely discern its likely shape: There exists today a very elaborate system of formal logic, and, specifically, of logic as applied to mathematics. This is a discipline with many good sides, but also with certain serious
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weaknesses. This is not the occasion to enlarge upon the good sides, which I certainly have no intention to belittle. About the inadequacies, however, this may be said: Everybody who has worked in formal logic will confirm that it is one of the technically most refractory parts of mathematics. The reason for this is that it deals with rigid, all-or-none concepts, and has very little contact with the continuous concept of the real or of the complex number, that is, with mathematical analysis. Yet analysis is the technically most successful and best-elaborated part of mathematics. Thus formal logic is, by the nature of its approach, cut off from the best cultivated portions of mathematics, and forced onto the most difficult part of the mathematical terrain, into combinatorics. The theory of automata, of the digital, all-or-none type, as discussed up to now, is certainly a chapter in formal logic. It will have to be, from the mathematical point of view, combinatory rather than analytical.(18) Neither here nor in later lectures did von Neumann elaborate on the nature of that combinatory mathematics, nor suggest from what areas of current mathematical research it might be drawn. Over the two decades following von Neumann's work on automata, researchers from a variety of disciplines converged on a mathematical theory of computation, composed of three main branches: the theory of automata and formal languages, the theory of algorithms and computational complexity, and formal semantics.(19) The core of the first field came to lie in the correlation between four classes of finite automata ranging from the sequential circuit to the Turing machine and the four classes of phrase structure grammars set forth by Noam Chomsky in his classic paper of 1959.(20) With each class goes a particular body of mathematical structures and techniques. Two features of the mathematics warrant particular attention. First, as the study of sequences of symbols and of the transformations carried out on them, theoretical computer science became a field of application for the most abstract structures of modern algebra: semigroups, lattices, finite Boolean algebras, -algebras, categories. Indeed, it soon gave rise to what otherwise might have seemed the faintly contradictory notion of "applied abstract algebra".(21) Second, as the computer became a point of convergence for a variety of scientific interests, among them mathematics and logic, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, linguistics, and computer programming, algebra served to reveal the abstract structures common to these enterprises. Once established, the mathematics of computation then became a means of thinking about the sciences, in particular about questions that have resisted traditional reductionist approaches. Two examples of particular importance to biology are Aristide Lindenmayer's L-systems, an application of formal language theory to patterns of growth, and, more
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18. John von Neumann, "On a logical and general theory of automata" in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior--The Hixon Symposium, ed. L.A. Jeffries (New York: Wiley, 1951), 1-31; repr. in Papers, 391-431; at 406. 19. For more detail see my "Computers and Mathematics: The Search for a Discipline of Computer Science", in J. Echeverra, A. Ibarra and T. Mormann (eds.), The Space of Mathematics (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1992), 347-61, and "Computer Science: The Search for a Mathematical Theory", in John Krige and Dominique Pestre (eds.), Science in the 20th Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), Chap. 31. 20. Noam Chomsky, "On certain formal properties of grammars", Information and Control 2,2(1959), 137167. 21. See, for example, Garrett Birkhoff and Thomas C. Bartee, Modern Applied Algebra (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) and Rudolf Lidl and Gunter Pilz, Applied Abstract Algebra (NY: Springer, 1984). 22. Aristide Lindenmayer, "Mathematical models for cellular interactions in development", Journal of Theoretical Biology 18(1968), 280-99, 300-15. W. Fontana and Leo W. Buss, "The barrier of objects: From dynamical systems to bounded organizations", in
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recently, Walter Fontana's and Leo Buss's theory of biological organization based on the model of the lambda calculus.(22)

J. Casti and A. Karlqvist (eds.), Boundaries and Barriers (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 56-116.

III. Generating the World

The computer is essential to those new approaches to biology, as it is to the application of cellular automata to a range of physical, biological, ecological, and economic investigations.(23) It is not a matter of calculating numbers where analytic solutions are not possible, but rather of defining the local interactions of a large number of elements of a system and then letting the system evolve computationally, because we have neither the time nor the mental capacity to derive that system. For example, rather than seeking a numerical approximation to the non-linear partial differential equations of fluid flow, one models the interaction of neighboring particles and displays the result graphically. Instead of a mathematical function, what emerges is a picture of the evolving system; an analytical solution is replaced by the stages of a time series.

23. For a general view, see Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998).

In other applications, the results may include new elements or new forms of interaction among them. In particular, the system as a whole may acquire new properties, which emerge when the interactions among the elements reach a certain level of complexity. Precisely because the properties are a product of complexity, that is, of the system itself, they cannot be reduced analytically to the properties of the constituent elements. The current state of mathematics does not suffice to gain analytical insight into the structures of such systems, and hence, although the computer by its nature is mathematical, we do not have means of understanding its mathematics, or rather the computation does not afford mathematical understanding, certainly not in the sense of Newton's Principia. In a certain sense, the notion of complexity as an emergent property of systems governed locally by simple relationships may have lain inherent in the mechanistic world view set forth in the seventeenth century. What was real was matter in motion. Matter had no essential properties other than mass or bulk, by which pieces of it occupied space to the exclusion of other pieces. Motion was a matter of change of place with respect to time, brought about by pieces of matter pushing one another around. None of this was directly observable; rather, it underlay observation itself. What the senses perceived, each in its own way, was changing patterns of matter impinging on matter. The complexity of the world lay in the complexity of those patterns of interaction. For Descartes, the behavior of heavy bodies referred to as "gravity" emerged from the interaction of the particles of the vortex surrounding the earth. At one level, this remains the case. The ultimate particles may embody a
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different catalog of essential properties, the laws of interaction may take a different form, but nothing of the "new" science challenges the role of those particles as the ultimate building blocks of the physical world. Similarly, nobody doubts that life as we know it is a chemical phenomenon, resting in principle on the interaction of fundamental particles. People now speak of "carbon-based" life, using the qualifier to suggest that there could be some other form but in so doing also accepting and reinforcing the premiss that life is a form of chemistry reflecting the potential inherent in the physical properties of carbon and hydrogen, which properties themselves emerge from the different numbers and configurations of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that constitute the atoms What has changed is the attitude toward the means of expressing the relationships among the fundamental particles and of transforming expressions at one level into expressions at another level. In the Principia, Newton could capture the basic relationship of bodies attracting one another by the expression ma = mm'/r2, where a by definition is d2S/dt 2. Moving from small particles to large bodies was facilitated by being able to show that forces among the constituents of a body conjoined to act as a single force concentrated at its center of mass. The equation relating the forces of two bodies acting on one another over a distance proved mathematically tractable, in the sense that one could solve it in closed analytic form. Unfortunately, the equation for three or more bodies, needed for any precise mathematical account of the motion of the planets and in particular for the motion of the moon about the earth, did not yield so easily to the techniques of the calculus. The subsequent articulation of the mechanical model of the physical world increasingly challenged the capacity of mathematics to transform descriptions at the level of the fundamental elements into descriptions at the level of direct experience. The main root of the modern computer leads directly from the need to substitute numerical approximations for differential equations that could not be solved in closed form. That was especially the case for systems of non-linear partial differential equations. The complexity of the systems they described did not lie in the equations but in their solutions, and it was admittedly a complexity that could not be captured in closed form. Now the models are not expressed in a general differential equation characterizing the whole system, which equation is then solved analytically or calculated with the aid of a computer. Rather, they are described at the local level by means of interactions with the immediate neighborhood, and the result is then generated. Thus the sciences seem to have given up on mathematical explanation.(24) Not entirely, however, and not without a struggle. John Holland, a pioneer in the application of cellular automata to biology and the creator of genetic algorithms, shows that some in the new field are not yet ready to surrender the insights of mathematical analysis. In the concluding chapter of Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Holland looks "Toward
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24. For the most recent and perhaps most extreme argument against the capacity of traditional mathematics and mathematical physics to encompass the complexity of the world, see Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, Inc. 2002).

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Theory" and "the general principles that will deepen our understanding of all complex adaptive systems [cas]". As a point of departure he insists that: Mathematics is our sine qua non on this part of the journey. Fortunately, we need not delve into the details to describe the form of the mathematics and what it can contribute; the details will probably change anyhow, as we close in on our destination. Mathematics has a critical role because it along enables us to formulate rigorous generalizations, or principles. Neither physical experiments nor computer-based experiments, on their own, can provide such generalizations. Physical experiments usually are limited to supplying input and constraints for rigorous models, because the experiments themselves are rarely described in a language that permits deductive exploration. Computer-based experiments have rigorous descriptions, but they deal only in specifics. A welldesigned mathematical model, on the other hand, generalizes the particulars revealed by physical experiments, computerbased models, and interdisciplinary comparisons. Furthermore, the tools of mathematics provide rigorous derivations and predictions applicable to all cas. Only mathematics can take us the full distance.(25) Details aside, Holland's goal, with which he associates his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, reflects a vision of mathematics that he and they share with mathematicians from Descartes to von Neumann. As von Neumann insisted in 1948, the mathematics will be different. To meet Holland's needs it "[will have to] depart from traditional approaches to emphasize persistent features of the far-from-equilibrium evolutionary trajectories generated by recombination."(26) Nonetheless, his sketch of the specific form the mathematics might take suggests that it will depart from traditional approaches along branches rather than across chasms, and that it will be algebraic. As the most recent work of Fontana on the lambda calculus applied to chemistry suggests, it will be a mathematics of a decidedly modern sort. That is to be expected. The Turing machine is a modern concept, conceived by a thinker who was nothing if not a reductionist. His 1936 paper sets on computation, and thus on computing machines, limits that are no less firm and no less universally accepted than the constraints of the laws of thermodynamics or of the constant speed of light. Today we confront the question of whether the computer, the newest and leading medium of scientific thought can be comprehended mathematically, i.e. in some way algebraically or analytically. If so, then it will be viewed as the newest chapter of a history that began in the 17th century with the beginning of algebraic thought. If not, then perhaps fifty years from now
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25. John H. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995)161-2.

26. Ibid., 171-2.

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someone will be giving a lecture on the topic of "The End of Algebraic Thought in the 20th Century."

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