‘The Application of Mathematics to Industry’

Abstract

I shall start this address with a few words about economics. It is unfortunate that few people will admit that the cause of our chronic dollar indebtedness is the reluctance of consumers abroad to buy our goods when they can get American equivalents. Why are American goods preferred to ours when American industrial workers have wages with five times the purchasing power of their British counterparts? The brief answer is that the Americans apply mathematics on a big scale in their industrial administration and in their technology. There are signs, too, that the Russians are also doing this, and they are also entering the export markets. Jeremiahs are not popular but it seems imperative for me to state that Britain must emulate these two rivals in order merely to survive and that our only hope of doing this is to replace crude trial and error methods by widespread scientific (and that means mathematical) calculation everywhere. Some of our firms do conduct their organisation and research in an admirable manner and some Research workers are well aware of what Professor Temple has called the “all-pervasive’ nature of mathematics.