Abstract
In 1972, I started studying Pure Mathematics at St. Andrews University and did an obligatory 10-week course in computing without hands-on experience. We wrote out our programmes in an appropriate language, Fortran or Algol. These instructions were typed on punch cards and entered into the computer by another. Corrections were inevitable!
The computer was invented by the English mathematician, Charles Babbage, ably assisted by another mathematician, Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, who developed the use of these cards. A computer language was named in her honour in 1979.
This system had been developed by the French weaver, Joseph Jacquard, to tell weaving machines how to create complicated patterns! Babbage was the first to realise that, if you can tell a machine how to order stitches, you can also tell it how to order numbers! It was a brilliant piece of lateral thinking which begat the computer age.
It takes faith to work on the boundaries of two entirely different worlds like weaving and computing to make these creative connections! This is what the gospel is all about as St Paul says, ‘through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross’ (Col. 1:20).
By contrast, Lovelace saw that mathematics was the key to making the necessary connections in our understanding. She wrote that it ‘constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which … are interminably going on’.
Interestingly, the Computer Building at St. Andrews University is called The Honey Building. John Honey wasn’t a specialist in computing, or even mathematics. But he illuminated the limitations of both. One day in 1800, he was a student worshipping in St. Salvator’s Chapel when bad news arrived. A small ship had run aground. Rescue attempts had failed.
Honey stripped tied a rope around his waist, and swam into the tempest. Creating a lifeline, he rescued all the fishermen single-handedly, swimming back and forth to the shipwrecked vessel.
He graduated from the university and became minister at Bendochy Church, dying thirteen years later at 33 following long ill-health. The likely cause was the injury sustained on his final trip to the stricken ship. He was struck across the chest by a falling mast!
Minister of Word and Sacrament, Honey broke the bread and shared the wine at Holy Communion, reminding his people of the sacrifice which Christ made in his broken body and shed blood.
Mathematics, however sophisticated, will never be able to abstract the essence of love nor plot the journey of the human heart. Only tangible things like flesh and blood and the harvest of wheat and grape will ultimately connect the world together and reconcile us all through the mystery of the cross!