Skip to main content

Mistress of Science - John Croucher and Rosalind Croucher ***

It's quite common these days to read clickbait headlines telling us about the 'Most brilliant woman scientist/mathematician you never heard of' - I doubt if I'm alone in saying quite genuinely I had never heard of Janet Taylor, or her work that John and Rosalind Croucher believe made her deserving of that title 'Mistress of Science.' In the preface to the book we are told that 'Janet Taylor, born Jane Ann Ionn, made her mark as a brilliantly gifted scientist of her era,' - but is this hyperbole or reality?

 This is far more a conventional biography than a scientific one, so while Taylor's work is certainly mentioned, we don't get a lot of detail about the science or the maths (a bit odd, given one of the Crouchers is a professor of statistics). As a biography, it's readable, if in a fairly old-fashioned style that spends rather more word count than is necessary on the comings and goings of the royals - though to be fair, the Crouchers give us a vivid picture of some aspects of life in London at the time, such as the thriving docks or the replacement of Old London Bridge. That rather dated style comes across, for example, in describing the visits made by Queen Charlotte to Taylor's Bedfordshire school (sponsored by the Queen) we are told that 'The queen's beautiful blue-grey eyes and genuine warmth always put the girls quickly at ease,' a sentence that seems more fitting for a romantic novel than a biography.

 There are some biographical aspects of interest - for example around Taylor's meeting her future husband when he helped her pick up her (English) books after she dropped them in the street in Antwerp (they were eventually married in the Hague) and in the odd tangle of their names. Pre-marriage they were Jane Ann Ionn and George Taylor Jane - so potentially she could have ended up as the amusing Jane Jane - but perhaps to spare this, Taylor dropped his surname for his maternal middle name and 'Jane Ann' became Janet.

 So, what were Taylor's scientific achievements? She seems to have been the driving force behind setting up a 'navigational academy' with her husband and writing on navigation - not exactly science, but a practical application of mathematics that was well-established, but that Taylor was able to fine tune in some respects. She was gifted and enjoyed mathematics. She was clearly fascinated from an early age by nautical astronomical navigation and seemed to have spent much of her spare time in early adulthood reading about this and performing her own calculations. A driving force in her work seemed to be to make correction for the non-spherical nature of the Earth - though the planet had been known to be an oblate spheroid since Newton's day, it seems the corrections employed weren't accurate enough for Taylor's level of precision.

 From the Crouchers' book it seems very likely that Janet Taylor certainly could have been a significant scientist in an age where this was a practical profession for a woman. It's rather harder to pin down any original scientific or mathematical contribution she was able to make. We are often told about her 'calculations' and 'equations' but not given any detail on what she did mathematically, or how original that mathematics was. She devised a fascinating mechanical navigational calculator - a kind of nineteenth century Antikythera mechanism - which seems to have had a lot of potential, but never went into production. (Once again, the Crouchers don't give us enough technical detail be sure what it could have done, though the Admiralty assessment of the time suggests it would have been impractical to use.)

 I think it's best to think of Taylor as the navigational equivalent of an engineer. She didn't come up with original maths or science, but was highly successful in her application of existing knowledge. This is not to undermine her achievements - especially given the bias against female participation of the time - but is a far more accurate description than to call her a 'brilliantly gifted scientist.' (Part of the problem is the rather loose use of the term 'science' before the mid-nineteenth century.) Despite the repeated use of the 's' word, this is not in any sense a scientific biography, but interesting nonetheless: it remains well worth reading as a life story.

 Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more