27 August 2025

In her ‘Little History of Mathematics’, Snezana Lawrence introduced me to a French mathematician by the name of  Gaspard Monge (1746-1818). I had never heard of him before but he is greatly celebrated in France with ‘a street, a square, a metro station, even shops, pharmacies and restaurants’ named after him.

One of his most widely respected discoveries was a way of teaching geometry by encouraging students  to imagine ‘a movement of elements and the traces they leave behind’ in space. He called his way of understanding geometry ‘descriptive geometry’.

It became very popular in France and in all its French speaking colonies in the nineteenth century. However, it never became popular in Great Britain. In fact, it never saw the light of day in our part of the world. Why was that?

Gaspard Monge was a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte.  He was also a mathematician with at least one theorem to his name. For most of their friendship, France was at war with Britain. Eventually, the British defeated Napoleon but there was cultural damage.

The political divide between France and Britain made academic communication more difficult. Monge was, in fact, a leader of the French Revolution. But political differences and warfare shouldn’t inhibit the sharing and the celebrating of knowledge.

Who knows, we all might have benefitted from a different approach to the teaching of geometry – one which stimulated our imaginations rather than obliged us to memorise shapes on the page, their formulae and their behaviour? It’s  to our advantage to embrace cultural difference and make friends for we are all children of God.