A biography of Charles Hutton (1737-1823)

Charles Hutton (1737-1823), teacher and promoter of mathematics, was best known during his lifetime as Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. During a long and extremely active career he was also a trainer of mathematics teachers, the head of a 'writing and mathematical school' in Newcastle, and Foreign Secretary to the Royal Society of London. In origin he was the son of a Durham colliery overseer; in his youth he had worked down the pits himself.

Hutton was a prolific author and editor, and his vast printed output is a rich mine for historians of science and mathematics. He was the editor of the popular Ladies' Diary, an annual compilation of mathematical and verbal puzzles; he also worked on the annual Nautical Almanack, whose tables of lunar positions effectively solved the problem of determining the longitude for ships at sea. His Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary (1795-6) is still an important source for information about mathematics and mathematicians in the period; his Course of Mathematics was many times reprinted, and was translated into various languages, including Arabic.

At Woolwich, Hutton trained a generation of artillery officers and military engineers from 1773 until his retirement in 1807. He performed experiments, refined theoretical results, and oversaw a revolution in attitudes to the use of instruments, mathematical tables and up-to-date scientific results by artillery officers. He may justly be said to have played a key 'back-room' role in the projection of British power around the globe in the late Georgian period.

At the Royal Society Hutton was awarded the Copley medal for his work on ballistics; later, in 1783-4 he was involved in a celebrated dispute with the Society's President Joseph Banks, ultimately concerned with the place of mathematics and mathematicians in the Society. Hutton left the Royal Society as a result, but the debate would continue, and ultimately the views of Hutton and his supporters would come to determine the role of mathematics in British science over the following decades. Hutton's writings and educational work would become an important part of the reform of British mathematics in the early nineteenth century.

No British mathematician of his generation had such an impact on his field or the wider world, yet Hutton has never been the subject of a book-length biography. The proposed project will involve approximately nine months of intensive work on archival and printed sources. Important archives for this project are in the Royal Society and at Sandhurst; Hutton's was a well-documented life, at least from his 1773 move to London. There will follow an equal period of writing-up, to produce a rigorous but accessible biography of this remarkable individual, together with associated research papers addressing wider themes arising from the research. As the most visible mathematical writer in Britain during the late Georgian period, Hutton serves as a lens through which this project will address wider questions about the changing role of mathematics in the period, some of which will be more appropriately addressed outside the biography.

Non-academic beneficiaries will be first and most importantly readers of the biography of Hutton, the main research output of this project. It is intended that this should be a commercial book for the general reader with sales of perhaps 10,000 copies. The PI has experience in this genre of writing: his recent book on Georgian almanacs and popular mathematics, published by Oxford University Press, received enthusiastic notices in publications such as New Scientist and the Literary Review. Readers will be enthusiasts for British history and the Georgian period in particular, those interested in mathematics and its history, and those interested in military history. The book will also have a special appeal to readers with a connection to the places Hutton grew up and worked in his early life: Durham, Newcastle and the North-East of England more generally.

Less directly, this project will also be of benefit to curators at institutions concerned with the history of science or of military history: the Science Museum in London, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and the National Army Museum, for instance. Through the curators of these and other collections this piece of research will impact on narratives presented to the public about the development of British mathematics and science during the enlightenment period, and their effect on military developments. It will thus be of benefit to those who wish to ponder how science and mathematics change, and how they have affected British national life.