Property: Quantity

Reference (What’s this about?)

Property - Quantity

0.0 MARY: Now I am going to look at another aspect of property, quantity – though of course, this is not a thing separate from quantity – in the modern world we are constantly transposing quality with quantity. We use digital devices to measure qualities – colors, temperatures, speeds, weights and such like — and we give these alphanumeric names which are much of the time impossible to speak.

0.42 MARY: These are some of the ways we represent quantity, in text, where some numbers are too long to say and some equations too complicated… and let me jump to speech for a moment. Only a few numbers are speakable in spontaneous speech and memorable for the purposes of later speaking, like the 36 apples we just counted in the tray, or the year 2020. If we need anything more than this, we have to read it out, which is not speaking in the normal sense. It is a multimodal practice reliant on text. Quantity can also be represented two dimensionally in image, three dimensionally in space, in the physics of objects, in the sensations our bodies feel such as temperature, and in sound, in musical notation which represents fractions of time and levels of pitch.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 153-56.

1.38 MARY: Here is Gottfried Leibniz, the great seventeenth to eighteenth century philosopher and mathematician. Now, Leibniz had a fantasy – what if all the meanings in the world could be expressed in numbers, every truth in the world could be determined mathematically? Then, he said famously, “where there are disputes among persons, we can simply say, ‘let us calculate,’ without further ado, in order to see who is right.”

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp.169-70.

2.11 MARY: Moving forward now into the nineteenth century, we meet another mathematical genius, Ada Lovelace. She had inherited her love of mathematics from her mother, Anne Isabella Noel Byron, the eleventh Baroness Wentworth. Anne’s husband and Ada’s father was the poet, Lord Byron. Ada’s father dismissively called his wife the “Princess of Parallelograms.” Dismissiveness like this has been the fate of women thinkers for too long.

2.47 MARY: At the age of eighteen, Ada Lovelace was introduced to the inventor Charles Babbage at one of the high society soirées he regularly held at his home in London. She was attending with her mother. On display in the drawing room of Babbage’s house was his “Difference Engine,” an elaborate mechanical calculator. Ada was transfixed.

3.11 MARY: This began a long professional association between Babbage and Lovelace. Their work together culminated in 1843 with the publication by Lovelace of a 20,000 word journal article about Babbage’s designs for a new Analytical Engine. Lovelace simply signed the article with her initials, A.A.L. In those days, who could have imagined this was written by a woman?

3.42 MARY: Over a hundred years later, one of the main founders of modern computing, Alan Turing, turned up Lovelace’s largely forgotten article, and was able to build on some of her key propositions.

3.56 MARY: Here are some of the words Ada Lovelace’s article, and I sure you will agree, for someone writing in 1843, these are remarkably prescient. By mathematical representation and calculation, she said, it may be possible to “express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst.”

4.41 MARY: Lovelace continues: “[T]he Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In these ways, “not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.”

5.10 MARY: The model for such mechanical possibility, Lovelace went on, was “the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.”

Lovelace was truly a modern genius, imaging how the qualities of the sensuous world might be transposed into quantities for the purposes of their representation and communication. Ada Lovelace had imagined how, in the future in which you and I now live, we might be able to build machines which manage the transpositions of quality into quantity.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 156-59.