Talk:Augustus De Morgan

Augustus De Morgan
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Buenasdiaz (talk • contribs) 18:21, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Hello. From searching the web for some of the text of the current version of this article, it looks like it is copied entirely from "Ten British Mathematicians of the 19th Century", by Alexander Macfarlane, dated 1916, at: http://www.gutenberg.net/etext06/tbmms10p.pdf (Project Gutenberg). That's great, no problem with copyright. The only thing I want to suggest here is that when source texts such as this are imported, it would be a good idea to put a note in the article or the talk page telling where it came from. Texts copied from other sources are an ongoing problem for Wikipedia -- let's make it easier to find the problematic articles by clearly labeling the ones that aren't a problem. Happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 05:53, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Mathematical induction was first used by Francesco Maurolico in 1575 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Maurolico) and completely understood by Pascal. The intro paragraph should be changed accordingly.Scorwin (talk) 21:32, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

whichever ancient work it was copied from, the style is dreadful. totally inappropriate for a modern encyclopedia and not likely to enlighten many people about the mathematics it pretends to explain. hopefully someone will scrap the lot and write something from scratch.

Is it "de Morgan" or "De Morgan"? I've seen both used. What language uses "De" in names? Is capitalizing "De" the usual convention in it? Kaol 22:08, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm guessing "de", latin/french for "of". Speaking of latin, could somebody please translate this?


 * He once printed his name: Augustus De Morgan, H - O - M - O - P - A - U - C - A - R - U - M - L - I - T - E - R - A - R - U - M.

I'm sure that's something very humorous in Latin, but, unfortunately, I only understand English... (man of few words perhaps?)

crazyeddie 06:06, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It means "Man of few letters." They were going to confer on him the degree Doctor of Letters. --Polylerus 23:03, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

The word "de" means "of" in all major romance languages (in Italian, it's "di"). "de" in most French names is in lower case unless it starts a sentence. Correct me if I'm wrong. ~

The "de" or "De" discussion
Fellow fans of Augustus De Morgan,

"de" is the Dutch language article corresponding to the English article "the". Many Dutch and Belgian surnames use that article, such as "De Wolf" (the wolf) or "Van de Velden" (from Velden). My speculation is that De Morgan's surname is of Dutch origin, since "from Morgan" does not make sense to me at all. In that case, it is customary but not necessary for the surname to start with a higher-case "D" (that goes for many other languages, e.g. I have a friend whose surname is "de Oliveira" and another whose surname is "De Rossi").

By the way, was I the only one to notice many parts of this article on De Morgan were copied from The MacTutor article?

Porcher 04:43, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
 * If you read the first comment in this Talk, you will see that they were both copied from the same source.Billlion 22:38, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * De Morgan doesn't seem Dutch to me, except if it were derived from De Morgen ("the morning"), though I can't find that name in the phonebook or on genealogy sites. Qwertyus 15:40, 24 May 2006 (UTC)


 * There are a number of Irish names that come from Latin through Norman French, De Leon is one, Delaney from De l’aunaie is another. For some reason they are generally written with a capital "De" as in De Morgan. It's a bit strange, though, since Morgan is a Celtic name. Billlion (talk) 08:58, 10 May 2008 (UTC) (Bill "De Leon")


 * Since English is not my mother tongue I cannot say that this is this way for sure, but in Spanish the article is "de" and we write "Augustus de Morgan" and (if we want to say just the surname) "De Morgan". This is a Spanish grammar general rule: When the surname has a particle such as "de" and we want to refer to that person just by saying his/her surname, we put "De". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.34.63.211 (talk) 18:58, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Since English is not your mother tongue, please leave the entire subject alone! Britain is the location of immigrants from many, many places. 23:14, 3 September 2012 (UTC)


 * It really is Augustus De Morgan; his handwritten name can be seen here: http://www.owenandbarlow.com/pd_augustus_de_morgan_1806-1871_autograph_letter_signed.cfm, and http://www.unav.es/gep/DeMorgan14.04.68G3.html. VWA (talk) 21:52, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

music
In what sense is this guy a 'British Music Theorist...? It seems to me that the 'category' is quite undeserved... Pfistermeister (talk) 02:13, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Removed it. Billlion (talk) 06:13, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Should
De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born. This is referred to in the article, but only vaguely. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.34.71 (talk) 12:14, 2 May 2009 (UTC) See http://www.engr.iupui.edu/~orr/webpages/cpt120/mathbios/ademo.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.170.8 (talk) 10:33, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Budget of Paradoxes
Now available at Wikisource. Regards, Paradoctor (talk) 23:58, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

The long quoted section including "met at Indianapolis in 1890" cannot be by De Morgan, who died in 1871. It might have been inserted by the editor of the second edition (1915), David Eugene Smith, but I have just scanned my copy of that edition and found no such thing. Hardly any of Smith's footnotes are anywhere near as long as this quote. Do not attribute this quote to De Morgan. StarryEye (talk) 04:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Budget Of Paradoxes has been available at Project Gutenberg for years. (Budget Of Paradoxes) Hpfeil (talk) 16:16, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Sleeping
One of my college professors told me years ago the man was famous also for sleeping 22 hours a day for the last 20 years of his life. I have to wonder if anyone knows if this is true. Jokem (talk) 21:14, 28 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Very doubtful. It is true that as the French mathematican Gaspard Monge grew older and older, he slept more and more every day. Monge also kept records of his hours of sleep, and since he was an old mathematican, he kept tables of his records, and he drew graphs of his hours of sleep. No kidding. Monge predicted that whenever he started sleeping 24 hours a day, then he would be DEAD - natually. Monge extended his lines and he made predictions for when that would happen for his servants, and whatever members of his family were around. (Maybe he didn't have any.) In the end, Monge got to where he was sleeping 23 hours a day, and at that point, he was so sick that he did die at that time. 98.81.2.69 (talk) 23:24, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

book excerpts
I noticed the same thing as Buenasdiaz, only 8 years later. Large portions of this article are taken verbatim from the publicly available book "Ten British Mathematicians", found here: http://www.archive.org/stream/tenbritishmathem09942gut/tbmms10p_djvu.txt

I also feel that the original work should be credited. It is linked to under further reading, but it's unclear from the article that the text is directly derived from it.

141.214.17.4 (talk) 00:08, 28 April 2012 (UTC)brendan

Cause of death?
The article currently states that De Morgan died of "nervous prostration" (mental breakdown).

Granted, health declines when the spirit breaks; but it's customary to give a physical diagnosis as the actual cause of death.

Karl gregory jones (talk) 17:51, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Augustus De Morgan - Claimed atheism as stated fact?
Adding individuals to atheism category may be in violation of several WP rules and guidelines

One source by parapsychologist John Beloff (president of the Parapsychological Association) Parapsychology: A Concise History (1993) is no enough for stating that someone has definite  belief in this or that. Augustus De Morgan non-conforming disposition as been interpreted by one parapsychologist Beloff as meaning he was atheist? That will not just do.

Statements and claims presented as a fact must be backed by balanced, certified and strong unequivocal research and scholarship with the help of multiple sources. Loose claims here and there are just opinions and does not amount to an fair and balanced view. Varying authors can be be used as a source for presenting an opinion for such and such, but it is still not to be deemed authoritative and conclusive.

Multiple sources and scholarly consensus must be the main aim when something is stated as a reasonable fact. Otherwise we are deceiving.

Pgarret (talk) 10:32, 9 November 2013 (UTC)


 * De Morgan was definitely not an atheist; he was fiercely anti-dogma. De Morgan's wife Sophia was very clear in her Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, pp. 366-368, and in the last sentence, on p. 368, she gave his reasons not to be publicly open in his beliefs: "The state of mind in which he had lived, and in which he died, is shown by a sentence in his will: "I commend my future with hope and confidence to Almighty God; to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom I believe in my heart to be the Son of God, but whom I have not confessed with my lips, because in my time such confession has always been the way up in the world."" VWA (talk) 13:26, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Furthermore (1) De Morgan's beliefs, where expressed, appear to be almost Unitarian: He married into a Unitarian family and held similar beliefs Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, p.86. The two current citations in the article of De Morgan's own writings about atheism indicate only that (2) De Morgan viewed being called an atheist as a slur: in Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, p.393 he points out that his accuser is wrong and that Voltaire is in fact a deist; (3) in An essay on probabilities, pp.22-23 he argues that belief in science does not imply atheism. Beloff's assertion that De Morgan was debarred from Oxbridge due to atheism misses the distinction between not ascribing to Church of England dogma and atheism. Perhaps the only thing that is clear is that De Morgan was adamant about not expressing his religious beliefs publicly, as indicated in the quote from his will. Phuzzball (talk) 13:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 1 one external link on Augustus De Morgan. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added tag to http://archives.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/dispatcher.aspx?action=search&database=ChoiceArchive&search=IN=MS913A
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100111053034/http://www.shl.lon.ac.uk:80/specialcollections/demorgan.shtml to http://www.shl.lon.ac.uk/specialcollections/demorgan.shtml

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 13:26, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Update needed
Much of the article seems to have been lifted from some antique encyclopedia, maybe the 1911 EB. It reads in ye-olde-tea-shoppe style and is woefully underlinked, rambling, poorly explained and lamentably under-cited. A rewrite might be in order. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:22, 3 October 2018 (UTC)


 * It's definitely in order - it's not impartial at all, nor well sited. It's a shame since some of it is quite interesting, like the "paradoxer to whom De Morgan paid the compliment which Achilles paid Hector — to drag him round the walls again and again", which reads like a commentary, but for that reason should be replaced. FinnberlyRobin (talk) 12:22, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Clarification needed
"A dispute arose between the professor of anatomy and his students, and because of the action taken by the council, several professors resigned, headed by De Morgan." What was the dispute? What was the action taken by the council? It would reveal something of De Morgan's character to know what he stood for. Did he lead the professors who quit or was he simply the first one? Rmrwiki (talk) 04:42, 16 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I have added a few details, links, and references. Rice 1997 has a nice synthesis on this. Interesting bit from De Morgan and co's letter to the administration: "There is no university in the world where it would be for a moment tolerated that the students should have any constraint direct or indirect over the appointment or removal of a professor." La plus ça change. Phuzzball (talk) 17:44, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Indian logic
The link between classical Indian logic and De Morgan, while potentially fascinating, appears to be purely speculative: Besides the Mary Boole quote and De Morgan's affinity for India, there does not seem to be any connection. Most of De Morgan's own writing on Indian mathematics is either despondent at its state (at the time) or optimistic at its potential modernization. The current citations are hand-waving at best. Is there any plausible connection? Phuzzball (talk) 04:03, 20 June 2024 (UTC)