Mathematician manqué
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Mathematician manqué is an unrequited or unaccomplished lover of mathematics. This condition is common among philosophers, apparently in response to the inscription above the door of Plato's Academy, let no one devoid of geometry enter here, ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω. (Quoted in Elias' commentary on Aristotle's Categories.)
The example of Thomas Hobbes is a stark embodiment of this tendency. As John Aubrey, Hobbes' earliest biographer records it,
Hobbes was in a gentleman's house in which a copy of Euclid's Elements lay open on a desk. When he read proposition 47, he said, "By G--, this is impossible". So he read the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.
This love went unrequited. In a letter he sent to Hobbes in August of 1662, mathematician Christiaan Huygens explained several mistakes that Hobbes had made in his purported solutions to the problems of squaring the circle and duplicating the cube, i.e. constructing a square equal in its area to a given circle and a cube of the volume double that of a given cube, using only a straightedge and a compass. Huygens expressed his hope that the time that he had spent on the refutation of Hobbes' geometrical errors would not be wasted if Hobbes would but keep his promise to abandon his extremely unsuccessful study of the whole of geometry. But Hobbes persisted in his erroneous and mathematically impossible claims. His obstinacy caused him to quarrel with eminent mathematicians John Pell and John Wallis, and to become branded in print by the latter as Hobbius Heautontimorumenos, in reference to the name of a classical Roman comedy by Terence, signifying one vexing himself, a self-punisher.
[edit] References
Squaring the Circle: The War Between Hobbes and Wallis, Douglas M. Jesseph, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
