The Hump of the Camel

This one’s just for fun, to find joy in some mathematical aspects of the creation. I did a post in September about the principle of plenitude, a term coined by historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy about a pervading concept of mediaeval and early modern thought in which it seemed that God must create everything possible or short change the world and himself. This was seldom stated overtly, being more part of the warp and weft of thought, comparable to the modern tendency to see absolutely everything in evolutionary (rather than, say, static or cyclical terms). The idea was probably at its peak in the late seventeenth century, summed up in the phrase natura non facit saltus, found in Linnaeus and treated as axiomatic by Newton and Leibniz. Infinities divided up in infinite ways were the big thing in calculus, taxonomy and even astronomy. Continue reading →