``The etherealization of common sense?'' Arithmetical and algebraic modes of intelligibility in late Victorian mathematics of measurement (Q1728758)

Quantity calculus, not generally claimed to be a branch of mathematics, nevertheless uses mathematics to describe relations between abstract physical magnitudes. This paper provides a historical analysis of issues involved in the late nineteenth century in creating a standard method for converting physical measurements from one system of units to another. It goes far in explaining why this topic, relatively straightforward today, was so contentious at the time. Some of the debate was in print or at professional organizations and standard-setting committees. Here, the focus is on a key period in 1878 when several of the most influential people brought matters to a head. On one side, Joseph David Everett, following James Clerk Maxwell, argued for an approach that ``depended upon interpreting the dimensional symbols L, M, and T as concrete (fundamental) units of length, mass, and time and treating them as susceptible of multiplication and division'' (p. 149). For William Thomson and his brother James, on the other side, this was a level of abstraction too far. For largely pedagogical reasons, they held to a traditional view in which arithmetic operations should apply only to numerical entities. Both sides agreed that the outcome should be a system that can be easily understood and used by the large community of users, such as telegraph engineers. It is this requirement, as well as the need for a broader application, that appears to have favored more the Thomsonian side in the end. Other parties come into the picture as well, such as Andrew Gray, William's successor at Glasgow, the Finnish mathematician August Fredrik Sundell, and the textbook writer Richard Wormell. References are given for more background information on the resistance to symbolic algebra during this time. However, the fantasy \textit{Alice} stories by Charles L. Dodgson (as Lewis Carroll), given here as an example, may not be the best evidence: while a number of their episodes can clearly be taken as satirical critiques of the new symbolic algebra, what they indicate of the author's mathematical opinion seems not so clear.