Lancelot Hogben

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician.

Quotes

This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly.
- Science for the Citizen (1938), epilogue

‘The change did not come about without obstruction from the representatives of custom thought. An edict of A.D. 1259 forbade the bankers of Florence to use the infidel symbols, and the ecclesiastical authorities of the University of Padua in A.D. 1348 ordered that the price list of books should be prepared not in “ciphers”, but in plain letters.’
- Hogben, Lancelot. Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self Educator. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1937. in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189

All the algorithms for fractions now used were invented by the Hindus. The Greek treatment of fractions never advanced beyond the level of the Egyptian Rhind papyrus. […] This inability to treat a fraction as a number on its own merits is the explanation of a practice [which] was as useless as it was ambiguous. […] When we remember that the Greeks and Alexandrians continued this extraordinary performance, there is nothing remarkable about the small progress which they achieved in their arithmetic. What is remarkable is that a few of them like Archimedes should have discovered anything at all about series of numbers involving fractional quantities.
- Lancelot Hogben, Hogben, Lancelot. Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self Educator. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1937. in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189

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.’
- Hogben: ‘Mathematics for the Million’ (London, 1942), p. 285.

In the whole history of Mathematics, there has been no more revolutionary step than the one which the Indian made when they invented the sign ‘0’ for the empty column of the counting frame.
- Lancelot Thomas Hogben. source: Mathematics for the Million, Lancelot Thomas Hogben. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.