Charles Babbage, Poet: on Chess and Miracles.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2797 (extended)

When reading through a volume of the Royal Society's quarterly publication on the stuff of science (for the year 1817) I came across an article on the Knight's Tour puzzle: "An Account of Euler's Method of Solving a Problem, relative to the Move of the Knight at the Game of Chess, from a  Correspondent", and which was published in  The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts, edited at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, published by John Murray for the Royal Institution, London, 1817-1818. After a little digging to find the authorship, I found that the "Correspondent" here is Mr. Charles Babbage himself, with the authorship established at least by the time of his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher if not before. The Knight's Tour puzzle--in which a  knight is moved around a chessboard (8x8 grid, though smaller and much larger have been used) so that every square is touched only once--is ancient, with the host of the famous 18th century mathematical revelers³ positioning the problem in the dim past, with Lucas in 1882 and then Kraitchik in 1927² fixing it more resolutely in India over 2000 years ago.

Babbage identifies the paper as his own in the section of his own "contributions to human knowledge" in his retrospective, Passages in the Life of a Philosopher, published in 1864. I've never read this book though I've used bits and pieces for research, and last night and today I've read in it quite a bit. Apart from the sheer enjoyment of the power of this guy's mind, I'm finding the book to be unexpectedly amusing. The man is actually funny, plus witty, and an entertaining writer--why this is so surprising, I don't know; perhaps it is because he is associated in a personal sense in my mind with General Winfield Scott, as they resemble one another, both looking Very Highly Contentious and gassy. In any event, I can safely say that this is a Good Read. 

Now to the Found Poetry part in this bit, the text of which is found in the appendix of the article, in the section called “On Miracles”. The text is as found, though the spacing/structure has been “poematized”to exhibit the great and hidden logical poetry of Mr. Babbage:

On Miracles

"1. That there is no real physical distinction between miracles 
and any other operations of the Divine energy: 
that we regard them differently 
is because we are familiar 
with one order of events 
and not the other. 

2. There is nothing incredible in a miracle, 
and the credibility 
of a miraculous event 
is to be measured only by the evidence 
which sustains it. 

And although the extraordinary character 
of a phenomenon may render the event itself improbable, 
it does  not, therefore, necessarily 
render it either 
incredible or untrue."

And the original:

There's a few pages of reasoning before we get to his enumerated "prepositions", but this should do nicely.  The guy was a very very good thinker. 

Full text of the article is found here: https://archive.org/stream/passagesfromlif01babbgoog#page/n510/mode/2up

Notes

1. See the "collected works" section in Babbage's Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864) where he outs himself as the author.  https://archive.org/stream/passagesfromlif01babbgoog/passagesfromlif01babbgoog_djvu.txt

2. "Chronology of Knight's Tours", compiled by George Jelliss, http://www.mayhematics.com/t/1g.htm

3. Just as a sample the folks working on this puzzle in the 18th c included d'Alembert and Diderot in theEncyclopedie; Jacques Ozanam  in Recreations Mathematiques et Physiques; d'Ortous de Mairan, Abraham de Moivre, Pierre Rémond de Montmort; Jean Etienne Montucla,, Leonhard Euler, and many others.

The "Euler" in the title refers to Leonhard Euler "Solution d'une Question Curieuse qui ne Paroit Soumise a Aucune Analyse", Mémoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres, Année 1759, volume 15, pp.310-337, which was the first mathematical paper on knight's tours.