Just a small footnote to Roy's remark. (I, too, second the  
significance of Roger Backhouse's work!) However, the idea that  
mathematics is a language goes back to Galileo who famously wrote in  
The Assayer:
"[natural philosophy] is written in that great book which ever lies  
before our eyes ? I mean the universe ? but we cannot understand it if  
we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it  
is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the  
symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without  
whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without  
which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth." This version cut  
and paste from:
  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Quotes

Eric Schliesser
BOF Research Professor, Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent  
University, Blandijnberg 2, Ghent, B-9000, Belgium. Phone:  
(31)-(0)6-15005958

  On Sunday, November 16, 2014 9:15 PM, E. Roy Weintraub <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


The path wasn't though through Fisher. Gibbs was the advisor/mentor of  
E. B. Wilson (his last Ph.D student), Samuelson's mathematical mentor  
at Harvard, and Wilson pushed him to Gibbs' ideas. See the definitive  
recent work by Backhouse, current at SSRN at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2510383