The Philosophy of the West Valley College
Mathematics Department

Morris Kline, one of this century's great mathematicians, in his book, A History of Mathematics in Western Culture, advances the thesis… that mathematics has been a major cultural force in Western civilization. Almost everyone knows that mathematics serves the very practical purpose of dictating engineering design.

Fewer people seem to be aware that mathematics carries the main burden of scientific reasoning and is the core of the major theories of physical science. It is even less widely known that mathematics has determined the direction and content of much philosophic thought, has destroyed and rebuilt religious doctrines, has supplied substance to economic and political theories, has fashioned major painting, musical, architectural, and literary styles, has fathered our logic, and has furnished the best answers we have to the fundamental questions about the nature of man and his universe.

As the embodiment and most powerful advocate of the rational spirit, mathematics has invaded domains ruled by authority, custom, and habit, and has supplanted them as the arbiter of thought and action. Finally, as an incomparably fine human achievement, mathematics offers satisfactions and aesthetic values at least equal to those offered by any other branches of our culture.

Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, states:

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses … supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than a man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry".

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