Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry…. if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry — an aberration which is happily almost impossible — it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science. [Wikipedia]
It reminds me of A Mathematician’s Apology by G. H. Hardy, which seems to have retrospectively rather outdated views on the applicability of certain fields of mathematics.
In the 40s the allies routinely bombed rail bridges to disrupt supply lines into Nazi-occupied France. After a raid, though, the Royal Air Force couldn’t fly reconnaissance missions over the targets as they were considered too risky, so it didn’t know if a bridge had been destroyed. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), however, came up with a novel strategy for finding out. By monitoring the daily prices of oranges on sale at various fruit stalls Paris, SOE agents dropped behind enemy lines were able to tell which supply chains had been affected.
I thought this quote from Wiener’s Cybernetics was apt for what CoMPLEX tries to achieve (i.e. interdisciplinary researchers):
If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in term that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand.