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Michael Gove speech to the Royal Society; ENGLAND: London: Royal Society: INT ** BEWARE CONTAINS SOME FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY ** Michael Gove MP (Education Secretary, Con) speaking with woman as drinks cup of tea / Gove mingling at event Michael Gove MP (Education Secretary, Con) speech SOT - Introductory comments about Royal Society ... - I feel a little nervous in these surroundings, I am a journalist by profession, a politician by accident and a historian in my dreams, I am, therefore, in all too many ways, poorly equipped to address an audience of the nation's most distinguished mathematicians and scientists. But, in advancing the argument I want to make today, history is perhaps more of an aid than it might at first appear. For some, like Karl Marx, the driving force in history was always economics. For others, like Edward Gibbon, it was theology, more recently some have argued that history is driven by evolutionary biology or geography or simple demography. But the truth, as I suspect everyone in this room knows, is that history is driven, above all, by mathematics and the power it gives us to understand, predict and control the world. The emergence of the first, truly great, Western civilization, in the scattered city states of Ancient Greece, was intimately connected with the first systematic thinking about reason, logic and number. Although Pythagoras himself is a figure shrouded by myth, the Pythagorean revolution he and his disciples set in motion was the prelude to the astonishing flowering of classical philosophy which laid the foundations of the Western world. On those first foundations men such as Euclid and Archimedes devised a means of making sense of the world which enabled their contemporaries, and successors, to master it. Greece bequeathed her mathematical heritage to Rome and the achievements of the Caesars, their imperial highways, feats of engineering and centralised accounts, were all the fruits of mathematical knowledge. Rome's fall ...