How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg

And yet Condorcet’s belief in the inexorability of progress guided by reason and math didn’t desert him. Sequestered in a Paris safe house, knowing he might not have much time left, he wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, laying out his vision of the future. It is an astonishingly optimistic document, describing a world from which the errors of royalism, sex prejudice, hunger, and old age would be eliminated in turn by the force of science. This passage is typical: May it not be expected that the human race will be meliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and the arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity; by farther progress in the principles of conduct, and in moral practice; and lastly, by the real improvement of our faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, which may be the result either of the improvement of the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of those faculties, or of the improvement of our natural organization itself?