Skip to main content

Mistress of Science - John Croucher and Rosalind Croucher ***

It's quite common these days to read clickbait headlines telling us about the 'Most brilliant woman scientist/mathematician you never heard of' - I doubt if I'm alone in saying quite genuinely I had never heard of Janet Taylor, or her work that John and Rosalind Croucher believe made her deserving of that title 'Mistress of Science.' In the preface to the book we are told that 'Janet Taylor, born Jane Ann Ionn, made her mark as a brilliantly gifted scientist of her era,' - but is this hyperbole or reality?

This is far more a conventional biography than a scientific one, so while Taylor's work is certainly mentioned, we don't get a lot of detail about the science or the maths (a bit odd, given one of the Crouchers is a professor of statistics). As a biography, it's readable, if in a fairly old-fashioned style that spends rather more word count than is necessary on the comings and goings of the royals - though to be fair, the Crouchers give us a vivid picture of some aspects of life in London at the time, such as the thriving docks or the replacement of Old London Bridge. That rather dated style comes across, for example, in describing the visits made by Queen Charlotte to Taylor's Bedfordshire school (sponsored by the Queen) we are told that 'The queen's beautiful blue-grey eyes and genuine warmth always put the girls quickly at ease,' a sentence that seems more fitting for a romantic novel than a biography.

There are some biographical aspects of interest - for example around Taylor's meeting her future husband when he helped her pick up her (English) books after she dropped them in the street in Antwerp (they were eventually married in the Hague) and in the odd tangle of their names. Pre-marriage they were Jane Ann Ionn and George Taylor Jane - so potentially she could have ended up as the amusing Jane Jane - but perhaps to spare this, Taylor dropped his surname for his maternal middle name and 'Jane Ann' became Janet.

So, what were Taylor's scientific achievements? She seems to have been the driving force behind setting up a 'navigational academy' with her husband and writing on navigation - not exactly science, but a practical application of mathematics that was well-established, but that Taylor was able to fine tune in some respects. She was gifted and enjoyed mathematics. She was clearly fascinated from an early age by nautical astronomical navigation and seemed to have spent much of her spare time in early adulthood reading about this and performing her own calculations. A driving force in her work seemed to be to make correction for the non-spherical nature of the Earth - though the planet had been known to be an oblate spheroid since Newton's day, it seems the corrections employed weren't accurate enough for Taylor's level of precision.

From the Crouchers' book it seems very likely that Janet Taylor certainly could have been a significant scientist in an age where this was a practical profession for a woman. It's rather harder to pin down any original scientific or mathematical contribution she was able to make. We are often told about her 'calculations' and 'equations' but not given any detail on what she did mathematically, or how original that mathematics was. She devised a fascinating mechanical navigational calculator - a kind of nineteenth century Antikythera mechanism - which seems to have had a lot of potential, but never went into production. (Once again, the Crouchers don't give us enough technical detail be sure what it could have done, though the Admiralty assessment of the time suggests it would have been impractical to use.)

I think it's best to think of Taylor as the navigational equivalent of an engineer. She didn't come up with original maths or science, but was highly successful in her application of existing knowledge. This is not to undermine her achievements - especially given the bias against female participation of the time - but is a far more accurate description than to call her a 'brilliantly gifted scientist.' (Part of the problem is the rather loose use of the term 'science' before the mid-nineteenth century.) Despite the repeated use of the 's' word, this is not in any sense a scientific biography, but interesting nonetheless: it remains well worth reading as a life story.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur