"Algebraical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula: 2 2 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a b c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... treating them. I went through Euclid (as far as usually read), Wood's Algebra, Wood's Mechanics, Vince's Hydrostatics, Wood's Optics, Trigonometry (in a geometrical treatise and also in Woodhouse's algebraical form), Fluxions to a good extent, Newton's Principia to the end of the 9th section. This was a large quantity, but I read it accurately and understood it perfectly, and could write out any one of the propositions ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that's here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to me by an algebraical equation." ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... senses; and on the other hand that, in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters, the briefest possible." Such is the basis of the algebraical or modern analytical geometry. The problem of the curves is solved by their reduction to a problem of straight lines; and the locus of any point is determined by its distance from two given straight lines—the axes of co-ordinates. Thus Descartes gave to modern geometry that abstract and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... that many another girl, besides myself, had first begun to chase some "unknown" phantom through the intricate stages of life at the same time that she was puzzling over the hidden meaning of an algebraic equation. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... You can't surmise what delightful secrets it will reveal later on. What will the end be? What a powerful appeal such a question will always make to a highly intelligent and imaginative mind like mine! No poetry! No beauty! Why every algebraic problem from the very nature of its being is surcharged with it! It's like the mystery of life itself, only in this case we solve the mystery! And if I may change the metaphor, an algebraic formula is like a magnificent diamond, ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... approached her simple algebraic problems Jose saw the working of a rule infinite in its adaptation. She knew not what the answers should be, yet she took up each problem with supreme confidence, knowing that she possessed and rightly understood the rule for correctly solving ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Literary tradition had grown old. Then England had her beginning of landscape gardening. Later she saw the rise of Constable, Ruskin, and Turner, and their iridescent successors. Still to-day in England the average leading citizen matches word against word,—using them as algebraic formulas,—rather than picture against picture, when he arranges his thoughts under the eaves of his mind. To step into the Art world is to step out of the beaten path of British dreams. Shakespeare is still king, not Rossetti, nor yet Christopher Wren. Moreover, it was the book-reading colonial ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... bird may that be? Is it the ornithorynchus paradoxus? Mr. Schlosser was not wide awake there. The reference is evidently to Kant's essay upon the advantages of introducing into philosophy the algebraic idea of negative quantities. It is one of Kant's grandest gleams into hidden truth. Were it only for the merits of this most masterly essay in reconstituting the algebraic meaning of a negative quantity [so generally misunderstood ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... this X? It was an island lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean between the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer—an island most appropriately named by Robur in this algebraic fashion. It was in the north of the South Pacific, a long way out of the route of inter-oceanic communication. There it was that Robur had founded his little colony, and there the "Albatross" rested when tired with her flight. There she was provisioned for all her voyages. In X Island, Robur, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... n 1(-th.) Among English Cantabs these algebraic expressions are used as intensives to denote the most energetic way of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... subtract, multiply, divide, extract roots. algebraize^. check, prove, demonstrate, balance, audit, overhaul, take stock; affix numbers to, page. amount to, add up to, come to. Adj. numeral, numerical; arithmetical, analytic, algebraic, statistical, numerable, computable, calculable; commensurable, commensurate; incommensurable, incommensurate, innumerable, unfathomable, infinite. Adv. quantitatively; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... evidence presented to him is bewildering, indecisive, and obscure; and it may occur to him that the author is very like an individual who proposes to determine the value of two or three unknown quantities from one simple algebraic equation. His principal witness, Aristides, were he now living and brought up in presence of a jury, would find himself in rather an odd predicament. He is expected to settle the date of the death of Polycarp, and yet he knows nothing either of the pastor of Smyrna or of ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... Although chemical equations are quantitative, it must be clearly understood that they are not algebraic. A glance ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... farewell at the door, to hint an immediate and pressing need for "a very small darkey!" Next day, the diminutive African does not appear; but, as it is believed that Spanish officials prefer gold even to mortal flesh, his algebraic equivalent is unquestionably furnished in ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... conception of quantity, therefore, if rigorously analyzed, will indicate a priori the natural and impassable boundaries of the science; while a subsequent examination of the quantities called infinite in the mathematical sense, and of the algebraic symbol of infinity, will be seen to verify the results of this ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... primary impulses and emotions seem to be in all respects like our own. It is true that they are very unlike the typical civilised man of some of the older philosophers, whose every action proceeded from a nice and logical calculation of the algebraic sum of pleasures and pains to be derived from alternative lines of conduct; but we ourselves are equally unlike that purely mythical personage. The Kayan or the Iban often acts impulsively in ways which by no means conduce to further his best interests or deeper ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... BRICK. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up in the single word, BORE. These expressions come to be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy;—you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... ingeniously explained as personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work {467} out certain problems with: they are rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in Twice Told Tales and in the second collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... young Willard was seated between two brothers—Henry and Brayton Abbott by name—engaged in solving Algebraic problems, a whispered inquiry, regarding the lesson, passed from one ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... your shape Apply his T-square and his tape, And wish that you were more archaic; Why should I care? I love you best For what no compasses can test, For graces not to be expressed In terms however algebraic. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... this very name. Why? Its origin went back to old times; and being venerable they gloried therein; though they disclaimed its present applicability to any of their race; showing, that words are but algebraic signs, conveying no meaning except what you please. And to be called one thing, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... language with which we think prevents us from so doing. Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language—that is to say, one inapt for the needs of life—as indeed Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zuerich, attempted to do in his Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung), ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Detective Story requires the most complex plot of any type of short story, for its interest depends solely upon the solution of the mystery presented in that plot. It arouses in the human mind much the same interest as an algebraic problem, which it greatly resembles. Poe wrote the first, and probably the best, one in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue;" his "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Gold Bug" are other excellent examples. Doyle, in his "Sherlock Holmes" stories, is ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... to designate quantities, lines, etc., in algebraic, geometrical, and similar matter, and in explanation of diagrams ...
— The Uses of Italic - A Primer of Information Regarding the Origin and Uses of Italic Letters • Frederick W. Hamilton
... voluntary. The silent assumption is that by education and effort it can be made so. One may doubt whether in the sense required by Godwin's argument any human action ever is or can be absolutely "voluntary," rational or self-conscious. To attain it, we should have to reason naked in a desert with algebraic symbols. To use words is to think in step, and to beg our question. But Godwin is well aware that most men rarely reason. He is here framing an ideal, without realising its remoteness. The mischief of his faith in logic as a force, was that it led him to ignore the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... admission, that "the historical development of the abstract portion of mathematical science has, since the time of Descartes, been for the most part determined by that of the concrete." Further on we read respecting algebraic functions that "most functions were concrete in their origin—even those which are at present the most purely abstract; and the ancients discovered only through geometrical definitions elementary algebraic properties of functions ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... words, take one set of observations upon the combined time of the three elements numbered 1, 2, 3; another set upon elements 2, 3, 4; another set upon elements, 3, 4, 1, and still another upon the set 4,1, 2. By algebraic equations we may solve the values of each ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing distrust, one might ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... subtractions must be algebraic in all cases. Thus when the degrees are minus or below zero the rules for conversion might be put thus: To convert degrees F. below zero into centigrade to the number of degrees F. add 32, multiply by 5/9 and place a minus sign (-) before it. (b) To convert degrees centigrade below zero into Fahrenheit, ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the Italian scholar and physician, the father of algebraic science (you all recollect Cardan's rule,) believer in dreams, prognostics, astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of circumstances or with the gradual increase of information and intelligence the traditional may undergo slight modifications which scarcely rank as conscious departures from what has been passively accepted. The algebraic sum of such departures may, with the lapse of time, come to be by no means insignificant, yet no individual may have exercised in any considerable degree conscious reflection or shown in any ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... further that the one is to strut as the peacock does, the other to swarm as do ants? There are at the same time, as must be freely owned, investigations, moral no less than material, in which the nearer the words employed approach to an algebraic notation, and the less disturbed or coloured they are by any reminiscences of the ultimate grounds on which they rest, the better they are likely to fulfil the duties assigned to them; but these are exceptions. [Footnote: A French writer, Adanson, in his Natural ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... forms or values involving that step or expression are vitiated, and the results they seem to show substantially worthless. Now, every actually working mind, and at every stage, from schoolboy perplexities over algebraic signs, up to philosophic ventures in quest of one remove further of solid ground, in respect to the interrelations of physical forces, or the law of development of organized forms, finds itself in precisely the predicament of the mathematician: it feels ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... discoverable trace of imitation in his book. He has simply taken a method which has been most successfully applied in the study of French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... of the trust plank in that platform that it "did not anywhere condemn monopoly except in words." Exactly of what else could a platform consist? Does Mr. Wilson expect us to use algebraic signs? This criticism is much as if he said the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence contained nothing but words. The Progressive platform did contain words, and the words were admirably designed to express thought and meaning and purpose. Mr. Wilson says that I long ago "classified trusts ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... origin, in precisely the same condition which it at present preserves. Of the date of this origin, however, I grieve that I can only speak with that species of indefinite definiteness which mathematicians are, at times, forced to put up with in certain algebraic formulae. The date, I may thus say, in regard to the remoteness of its antiquity, cannot be less than any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... verdict of guilty, they attempted reconciliation in various ways. Indian speculation invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the Karma or soul-character passed from individual to individual, the algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to merit. The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent First Cause. Evil was incompatible with this, and so they held, against experience, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... in every sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds. The earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... in the history of mathematics are the calculations published by the weather-prophet of the Express. Arithmetic turns pale when she glances at them, and, striking her multiplication table with her algebraic knuckles, demands to know why the Express does not add a Cube-it ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... resource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure. For a vicious circle, its mathematical completeness approached perfection. The dynamic law of attraction and reaction needed only a Newton to fix it in algebraic form. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... "and I understand it, although your x's and zero's, and algebraic formula, are rattling in my head like ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. He observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. With the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows something of extension and quantity. Upon these figures and signs his senses rest their knowledge of the abstractions just named. He makes no attempt to learn the nature of things, but only such of their relations as concern himself. He estimates external things only by their relation ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... moment to the shining isle, the green sward, the singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself. Symbols were barren algebraic formulae. Not enchanters' words. No light. No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers—no more! It wasn't his past that was ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... which purports to be for the improvement of navigation whatever other purposes it may also embody; nor does the stream involved have to be one which is "navigable in its natural state." Such, at least, seems to be the algebraic sum of its holdings in Arizona v. California,[362] decided in 1931, and in the United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Co.,[363] decided in 1940. In the former the Court, speaking through Justice Brandeis, said that ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the essential forms which can affect the organism. This is a universal algebraic formula, by which we can solve all organic problems. We apply it to the hand, to the shoulder, to the eyes, to the voice—in a word, to all the agents of oratorical language. For example, it suffices to know the eccentro-eccentric form of the hand, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... fermentation, by observing, that it furnishes us with the means of analysing sugar and every vegetable fermentable matter. We may consider the substances submitted to fermentation, and the products resulting from that operation, as forming an algebraic equation; and, by successively supposing each of the elements in this equation unknown, we can calculate their values in succession, and thus verify our experiments by calculation, and our calculation by experiment reciprocally. I have often ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... OBJECT CLEAR AND DEFINITE.—Whatever attention centers upon stands out sharp and clear in consciousness. Whether it be a bit of memory, an "air-castle," a sensation from an aching tooth, the reasoning on an algebraic formula, a choice which we are making, the setting of an emotion—whatever be the object to which we are attending, that object is illumined and made to stand out from its fellows as the one prominent thing in the mind's eye while the attention ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... students were diligently at work, Sarah in the role of preceptress, hearing Amanda's French verbs, or helping to discover the perplexing value of X in an algebraic equation. Only occasionally did the thoughts of ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... essayed in any similar work. The closeness and brevity of his descriptions make it one of the dryest productions ever issued on geological science, scarcely omitting the work of Humboldt, in which he sought to represent the whole of geology by algebraic symbols. Percival's work actually demands, and would richly repay, a translation into the vernacular of descriptive geology,—the language and mode of illustration employed by Murchison and Hitchcock. In its present ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... study all the minutiae of racing. [Talking of that, how annoying it is—or was—when one cared about things of great moment, to take up an evening newspaper's last edition and read in large type "Official Scratchings," with a silly algebraic formula underneath about horses being withdrawn from some race, when you thought it was a bear fight in the Cabinet.] Vivie gathered from her guide that to-day would be rather a special Derby, because it did not often happen that a King-Emperor was there to see ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... of Physics, Professor Silliman says, 'all its phenomena are dependent on a limited number of general laws ... which may be represented by numbers and algebraic symbols; and these condensed formulae enable us to conduct investigations with the certainty and precision ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... which geometrically opposite facts—namely, two lines (or areas) which are opposite IN SPACE give ALWAYS a positive product—ever come into anybody's head till I was led to it in October, 1843, by trying to extend my old theory of algebraic couples, and of algebra as the science of pure time? As to my regarding geometrical addition of lines as equivalent to composition of motions (and as performed by the same rules), that is indeed essential in my theory but not peculiar ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... that have been made in defence of property; and, as on the other hand the right of property is only exercised over those things which can be appreciated by the senses, justice, secretly objectifying itself, so to speak, must take the shape of an algebraic formula. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... psycho-chemic terms, or draw its graph in psycho-mechanic terms: or write, in romantic terms, the circumstances and sequences of any chemic or electric or magnetic reaction: or express any historic event in algebraic terms—or see Boole and Jevons for economic ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... apparent heat it was with unalterable fixedness of purpose. They were of a common race. The duke was determined that she should wed Doppelkinn; she was equally determined that she should not. The gentleman with the algebraic bump may figure this out ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... origins through the same water. When, for example, you throw two stones into still water, the ring-waves proceeding from the two centres of disturbance intersect each other. Now, no matter how numerous these waves may be, the law holds good that the motion of every particle of the water is the algebraic sum of all the motions imparted to it. If crest coincide with crest and furrow with furrow, the wave is lifted to a double height above its sinus; if furrow coincide with crest, the motions are in opposition and their sum ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... attested, of every successive hour between these limits having been the known established hour for the royal dinner-table within the last three hundred and fifty years. Time, therefore, vanishes from the equation: it is a quantity as regularly exterminated as in any algebraic problem. The true elements of the idea, are evidently these:—1. That dinner is that meal, no matter when taken, which is the principal meal; i.e. the meal on which the day's support is thrown. ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,—an appearance of health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette, after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis, I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was thankful for the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... here Mr. Morris seems to us to be in complete accord, not merely with the spirit of Homer, but with the spirit of all early poetry. It is quite true that language is apt to degenerate into a system of almost algebraic symbols, and the modern city-man who takes a ticket for Blackfriars Bridge, naturally never thinks of the Dominican monks who once had their monastery by Thames-side, and after whom the spot is named. But in earlier times it was not so. Men ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... masterly manner, and with equal success. His position as a geometer is perhaps better understood from the assertion made respecting him by a modern mathematician, that he came as near to the discovery of the Differential Calculus as can be done without the aid of algebraic transformations. Among the special problems he treated of may be mentioned the quadrature of the circle, his determination of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter being between: 3.1428 and 3.1408, the true value, as is now known, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... across Caesar's bridge, and through Virgil and Horace. I am indebted to it for a tolerable understanding of grammar, arithmetic, geography, and other occult sciences. It enlightened me not a little upon many algebraic processes, which, to speak truth, presented, otherwise, but slender claims to my consideration. It disciplined me into a uniform propriety of manners, and instilled into my bosom early rudiments of wisdom, and principles of virtue. In my maturer years, the contingencies of life have thrust ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... to a story by the great American romancer, which is a masterpiece. Who has not read the "Gold Bug?" In this novel a cryptogram, composed of ciphers, letters, algebraic signs, asterisks, full-stops, and commas, is submitted to a truly mathematical analysis, and is deciphered under extraordinary conditions, which the admirers of that strange genius can never forget. On the reading ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... agonised criminal; whisper courage, brother, courage, at the ghastly deathbed, and strike down the infidel with the lance of evidence and the shield of reason!' In a pecuniary point of view I am confident, nay, the calculations may be established as irresistibly as an algebraic equation, that I can realise, as incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel, the sum of not less than one thousand pounds per annum. Such a sum, with economy (and without it what sum were sufficient?), will ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the oxygen gas mixed with azote in atmospheric air, and he thinks that he has fully succeeded, by a process not attended with much difficulty. He details some unexpected results from his experiments. Cauchy made profound reports (from committees) respecting the Researches on Algebraic Functions by M. Puiseux, and the studies of Crystallography by M. Bravais. Papers on the speed of sound in iron, and on respiration in plants, and new schemes of atmospheric railroads were submitted. Attention was given to M. Burg's new observations concerning the advantageous ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Doubt, because it is the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority of mankind, who say in their hearts: 'Let us think no more of these problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given us so many other ways to get ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... I did so and found Captain Nemo busy with calculations in which there was no shortage of X and other algebraic signs. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... so in the examples given by the bending osier and the waving grain,—also by the few who have seen full drawings of all the forms. And the mathematician finds in it a new beauty, from its marvellous correspondence with the motions of a pendulum,—the algebraic expression of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... infinitesimally small numeral in a mathematical formula. But let me see a child abused, and the red blood will rush to my head from rage. And when I look and look upon the labour of a moujik or a labourer, I am thrown into hysterics for shame at my algebraic calculations. There is—the devil take it!—there is something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is stronger than human reason. Take to-day, now ... Why do I feel at this minute as though I ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... are useful: Always place the button to be weighed on the left pan of the balance, the weights on the right; count the divisions of the scale from the centre to right and left, marking the former and the latter -; thus -5 is the fifth division to the left. Then the position of rest is half the algebraic sum of two readings. For example, let the readings be 7 to the right and 3 to the left, then (7-3)/2 2. The mean division is the second division to the right. If the student will place himself ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... in the nature of the mind, illustration and explanation must not of necessity proceed from the lower to the higher? or whether a boy is to be taught his addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, by the highest branches of algebraic analysis? Is there any better way of systematic teaching, than that of illustrating each new step, or having each new step illustrated to him by its identity in kind with the step the next below it? though it be the only mode in which this objection ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not mean what is technically called a living language,—the contrivance, hollow as a speaking-trumpet, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... homogeneous wave. If they have to each other a complicated ratio, such as 500:504, the air- waves will not only not coalesce, but four times in the second the through of one wave will meet the crest of the other, thus making the algebraic sum zero, and producing the sensation of a momentary stoppage of the sound. When these stoppages, or beats, as they are called, are too numerous to be heard separately, as in the interval, say, 500:547, the effect is of a disagreeable roughness of tone, and this we call discord. ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... which it takes in the poorer classes, by its care for their welfare and the algebraic account it keeps of all their misery and needs, political economy had, of course, given to Henri Mauperin a colouring of Liberalism. It was not that he belonged to a very decided Opposition: his opinions were merely a little ahead of Government principles, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... reference to whose pleasures and pains each one of the first six items ought in strictness also to be calculated. Then sum up all the pleasures which stand to the credit side of the account; add the pains which are the debit items, or liabilities, on the other; then take their algebraic sum, and the balance of it on the side of pleasure will be the good tendency of the act upon the whole." (Dewey ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... others have supposed to be of a distinct nature, and to resist all further analysis) gives way before Mr. Ricardo's law, and is eliminated; an admirable simplification, which is equal in merit and use to any of the rules which have been devised, from time to time, for the resolution of algebraic equations. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... without turning round. "They are humorous all, and so each furnishes something suitable for the saddened mind. Wisdom comes through understanding your alphabet properly. For instance, first there was Gilbert, and that gave us G; then came Kipling, and he gave us K; thus we get an algebraic formula, G.K., which are the initials of Chesterton, a still later arrival, and as the mind increases in despondency it sinks lower and lower down the alphabet until it comes to S, and thus we have Barn-yard Shaw, an improvement on the Kail-yard school, who takes the O pshaw view of ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... more, imagine it rolling on an indefinite straight line and ask what course does the focus of this curve follow. The answer comes: The focus of the parabola describes a 'catenary,' a line very simple in shape, but endowed with an algebraic symbol that has to resort to a kind of cabalistic number at variance with any sort of numeration, so much so that the unit refuses to express it, however much we subdivide the unit. It is called the number e. Its value is represented by ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes—unemotional as two algebraic x's—would be a matter fearfully different. Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... hated sums. All arithmetical difficulties had confused and sickened him. But now he worked with indefatigable industry on an imaginary slate; put his postulate, counted probabilities, allowed for chances, added, deducted, multiplied, and unknowingly performed algebraic feats, till his brows were stiff with frowning, and his brain craved ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
