More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by (...) Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’. (shrink)

The study is focused on the relation between theology and mathematics in the situation of increasing secularization. My main concern in the second part of this paper is the early-twentieth-century foundational crisis of mathematics. The hypothesis that pure mathematics partially fulfilled the functions of theology at that time is tested on the views of the leading figures of the three main foundationalist programs: Russell, Hilbert and Brouwer.