One hundred years ago
Mr Carvell Williams is very justly elated at the success of the Nonconformists in the Cambridge Mathematical Honours List. He writes to Monday's Times that both this year and last_ year the Senior . Wrangler has been a Nonconformist, and this year both the second and third Wranglers are Nonconformists also. In twenty-one years there have been fourteen Nonconformist Senior Wranglers, in spite of the fact that the large majority of the Undergraduates of Cambridge are members of the Church of England i This is very remarkable, and perhaps it is almost as remarkable that no similar success is quoted in relation to the Classical Tripos, Does Nonconformity tend to capacity for mathematics, or is it that mathematical capacity tends to Nonconformity? To some extent, perhaps, the latter. Certainly, if the laymen of the Church of England were expected to accept the Thirty-nine Articles, we should not be surprised that mathematicians were averse to the Church. But the logical faculty is not, perhaps, the one which ought to be supreme in determining the type of religious worship.
Spectator, 12 February 1881
Previous page
