August 16, 1976 XY

Professor Stillman Drake

Institute for the WYstory and
Philosophy of Science and Technology

University of Toronto

Toronto, Canada

Dear Stillman,

I have fond recollections of our occasional discussions that styated
before you plunged into the academic pool fulltime. I have had the occasional
opportunity to see with pleasure your sustained studies in an area that as
time passes have come to interest me more and more, though only on an
amateur basis.

Your ekchange of correspondence with the erstwhile geneticist
Donald Michie in a recent Scientific American hinted that you might be
just the person to answer a question that has been bothering me for a while,
concerning the history of the idea of compound interest.

Years ago I wondered how Henry Adams could be so profoundly influenced
by the idea of "the law of acceleration" unless this was in some sense a
novel concept. Or to put the matter back further a little while, one might
make a gimilar point, more strongly, with respect to Malthus.

But then I tried to get a bit better insight into the history of the
notion of exponential growth - and I have to admit that I did not check in
Malthus for his own sources - and have not known quite how to look. In a
brief conversation, Cipolla suggested that the laws of economic growth in
medieval times may not have followed the modern exponential form on account
of the difficulty of accumulating productive capital. However, it is
difficult to see how one could avoid this perception by the mere examination
of the proliferation of cattle. And I believe there is a story - but ou know
the source?- of the Babylonian consultant who bamboozled the emp8rer into
granting him 264 grains of wheat as his stipend.

Since you mentioned that Galileo showed how to use his machine to
calculate compound interest, I thought you might be able to give me some
further enlightenment on the history of this particular concept, for any
path to which I would indeed be appreciative.

I have been working dmwing the past several months in close collaboration
with Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman on a historical-sociological study
of the antecedents of my own scientific work in microbiology. I do not know
whether having been part of the story myself makes historical insight even
more difficult, but I do have an evergrowing appreciation for the problematics

-2-

-6'2

 
Professor Stillman Drake

of historical

JL/rr
Enclosure

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from

this experience.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

8/16/76