"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "whole pyramid arranged in subservience to it." The accounts of it published by Mr. Taylor, and in Mr. Smyth's first work, further aver that the coffer is, internally and externally, a rectangular figure of mathematical form, and of "exquisite geometric truth," "highly polished, and of a fine bell-metal consistency" (p. 99). "The chest or coffer in the Great Pyramid" (writes Mr. Taylor in 1859) "is so shaped as to be in every part rectangular from side to side, and from end to end, and the bottom is ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... was a green-eyed redhead whose five-ten and one-fifty would have looked big except for the arrangement thereof. There were Bernadine and Hermione van der Moen, the leggy, breasty, platinum-blonde twins—both of whom were Cowper medalists in physics. There was Etienne de Vaux, the mathematical wizard; and Rebecca Eisenstein, the black-haired, flashing-eyed ex-infant-prodigy theoretical astronomer. There was Beverly Bell, who made mathematically impossible chemical syntheses—who swam channels for days ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... over the State eleven days before the election. It was a powerful campaign document. People had not realised what an avenging hand pursued Tammany, but they now understood that Tweed was a common thief, and that Tilden, by reducing strong suspicion to a mathematical certainty, had closed the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... 'the mould-board of least resistance;' and the inventor had gone into a very profound mathematical demonstration, to prove that ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... the mark as is above it that saying of some one, "An undevout astronomer is mad." A man's being endowed with rare mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout. His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,—as she was upon Pascal and Newton,—the presumption as to an astronomer, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... College, London. In 1881 he gave up academic teaching, to devote himself to literature. He investigated the permanence of the English coal-supply in "The Coal Question" (second edition, 1866). "The Theory of Political Economy" (1871) contains his application of the mathematical method, and a bibliography of similar attempts. "The Railways and the State" are to be found in his "Essays and Addresses" (1874). He prepared an elementary book, "Primer of Political Economy" (second edition, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... still beyond its reach. The spot is chosen with reference to its evenness of surface, and that is preferred which is the least encumbered with stones. This matter being arranged, the birds proceed, with one accord, and actuated apparently by one mind, to trace out, with mathematical accuracy, either a square or other parallelogram, as may best suit the nature of the ground, and of just sufficient size to accommodate easily all the birds assembled, and no more—in this particular seeming determined upon preventing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... causes, which lie outside of that mathematical point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... earlier half of the last century, there lived in one of the villages on the outskirts of the moor on which the Cheese-Wring stands, a stonecutter named Daniel Gumb. This man was noted among his companions for his taciturn eccentric character, and for his attachment to mathematical studies. Such leisure time as he had at his command he devoted to pondering over the problems of Euclid: he was always drawing mysterious complications of angles, triangles, and parallelograms, on pieces of slate, and on the blank leaves of such few books as he possessed. But he made very slow ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... through a transparent bluff. Berta had settled back, coolly resigned to fate. How she must suffer, after having stooped to ask for aid! Poor Robbie Belle! Poor, lonely, disappointed Robbie Belle! For strange to say she flunked too and the question journeyed on triumphantly to the mathematical prodigy at the end of ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... vividly illustrates my correspondent's quaint and pregnant inquiry. Macaulay was "colour-blind" to science, and the most painful times in his happy life were the hours devoted at Cambridge to mathematical and mechanical formulae. The genuinely cultured person is the one who thinks nothing of fashion and yields to his natural bent as directed by his unerring instinct. A certain modern celebrity has told us how his early days were ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... should be leveled and compressed into a half-inch thickness before the boiling water was introduced. Practically the same result was achieved in the De Belloy and Hadrot pots, also provided with water-spreaders and pluggers, but the same mathematical exactitude in the matter of the depth of the ground coffee before the percolation started was not assured. De Belloy's spreader did not have the projections on the under side upon which Count Rumford ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... some lying down, Others standing, as if listening to the shepherd— Others bearing a cross, one foot lifted up— Why not chisel a few shambles? And fallen columns! Carve the pedestal, please, Or the foundations; let us see the cause of the fall. And compasses and mathematical instruments, In irony of the under tenants, ignorance Of determinants and the calculus of variations. And anchors, for those who never sailed. And gates ajar—yes, so they were; You left them open and stray goats entered your garden. And an ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... Frederick the Great, you will see the exact image of Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of those celebrated personages. Their heads coined in the same mint (for each had the characteristics of a medal) showed a stern and quasi-puritan profile, cold tones, a mathematical brain, a certain narrowness about the features, shrewd eyes, grave lips, and a something that was surely aristocratic—less perhaps in sentiment than in habit, more in the ideas than in the character. All men ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... enough when it is exercised by a competent body. A university can confer a degree upon a distinguished man because it can judge whether his degreeless condition is due to accident or not. It would, however, be highly ridiculous and paradoxical if the general public were to confer mathematical degrees. A degree of efficiency conferred by an inefficient body is ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of a mausoleum dedicated to Napoleon, which evinced much taste and ingenuity. His workshop at once intimated that its occupant was not abundantly gifted with the organ of order. Plates, dishes, knives, forks, candlesticks, coats, hats, books, and mathematical instruments, lay in one confused mass, each enveloped with its portion of dust. To attempt any thing like arrangement, was at once sacrilege in the estimation of the Colonel. To summon his attendant he usually approached ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... men, judging by the multitudinous number of flashes that sparkled from their paddles as they swung rhythmically into and out of the water: and they were all keeping line too, for the whole ten swung up into view together on the crest of a sea, and then disappeared again in the trough, with almost mathematical regularity and precision. Without a doubt the anticipated invasion of our island by the savages was about to take place; and, equally without a doubt too, the invaders must gain a footing upon our territory before we were prepared to quit ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... spelling match his father's millions did not aid him in competing with Patsy Halloran, the mathematical prodigy whose father was a hod-carrier, nor with Mona Sanguinetti who was a wizard at spelling and whose widowed mother ran a vegetable store. Nor were his father's millions and the Nob Hill palace of the slightest ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... duty and suffering, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, white and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Reverend Richard Greswell, B.D., Tutor of Worcester College.); but we did not merely want any theological discussion, so we shouted them down. Then a Mr. Dingle got up and tried to show that Darwin would have done much better if he had taken him into consultation. He used the blackboard and began a mathematical demonstration on the question—"Let this point A be man, and let that point B be the mawnkey." He got no further; he was shouted down with cries of "mawnkey." None of these had spoken more than three minutes. It was when these were shouted down ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... well-trained mathematician or man of science, and the average Englishman. The number of marks obtained by high wranglers, is often more than thirty times as great as that of the men at the bottom of the honour list, who are still of fair mathematical ability; and it is the opinion of skilled examiners, that even this does not represent the full difference of intellectual power. If, now, we descend to those savage tribes who only count to three or five, and who find it impossible to comprehend the addition of two and three without having the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a certain mathematical probability that any one of the above speculative answers is correct—correct for this one case. If you try this type of speculation on hundreds of sightings with "unknown" answers, the probability that the speculative answers are correct ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... it will require further research, and probably close investigation, both experimental and mathematical, before the exact mode of action between a magnet and metal moving relatively to each other is ascertained; yet many of the results appear sufficiently clear and simple to allow of expression in a somewhat general manner.—If a terminated wire move so as to cut a magnetic curve, a power is called ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... Even as an explanation of the spiral nebul, not as solar systems in process of formation, but as the birthplaces of stellar clusters, the Planetesimal Hypothesis would be open to many objections. Granting its assumptions, it has undoubtedly a strong mathematical framework, but the trouble is not with the mathematics but with the assumptions. Laplace was one of the ablest mathematicians that ever lived, but he had never seen a spiral nebula; if he had, he might have invented a hypothesis to suit its phenomena. ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides, he was very good-looking, of medium stature, but beautifully proportioned, dark, with fine ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a little implement which one could carry in his hand, but which was more powerful than any battleship that ever floated. The details of its mechanism could not be easily explained, without the use of tedious technicalities and the employment of terms, diagrams and mathematical statements, all of which would lie outside the scope of this narrative. But the principle of the thing was simple enough. It was upon the great scientific doctrine, which we have since seen so completely and brilliantly developed, of the law of harmonic vibrations, extending from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... resumed the killer, after quietly letting a pint of ale run down his throat of its own accord, and setting down the cup with mathematical exactness upon the spot from which he had raised it—'another went out ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of the pen faded into the silences of the great room. The Secretary of Justice ran his fingers over his forehead, looked up, and met the Inspector's gaze—fixed, profound, and mathematical. With a sudden unease he pushed back his chair, troubled by the analysis of his banal man, who, in another turn of Fate, might pursue him as dispassionately as he now stood before him for his commands. With a few rapid strides he crossed the room, lit a cigar, blew into the swirl ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... with equal eagerness, he will do well to recollect that the minds of his readers are not likely to be equally discursive, and that he is apt to destroy the influence, or mar the effect of each, if he blends them together; separation of works is the one thing needful there. A mathematical proposition, a passage of poetry, a page of history, are all admirable things in their way, and each may be part of a work destined to durable celebrity; but what should we say to a composition which should present us, page about, with a theorem of Euclid, a scene from Shakspeare, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... that all degrees of arithmetical aptitude are found in the human races, from the genius of a Newton and a Laplace to the absolute inability of certain of the Hottentots to count to three. These inequalities in the mathematical notions of different people should make us very cautious about saying that animals cannot count and have no sense of numbers. It is extremely probable that if we had a way of choosing those animals with a special gift for arithmetic, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... proportion of elements (Chemistry), symmetrical arrangement of parts (Crystallography), numerical and geometrical relation of the forms and movements of the heavenly bodies (Spherical Astronomy), all of which are capable of exact mathematical expression. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... I want is to give to my investigation the precision of a mathematical demonstration—I want my conclusions to be as plain, as indisputable, as that twice two are four. Now, supposing I have this gentleman arrested prematurely, though I may be positively certain that he is THE MAN, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... the "Stuyvesant" communications, Howard is calculating on the cumulative value of interest; and he analyzes it in this mathematical way: ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... his mathematical and scientific turn. Then, since you do not object, I will see whether he would like it, or if it be practicable in case Miss Charlecote ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... game if all combinations could be tested and probed exhaustively by the mathematical process just shown. But we shall find that the complications met with are extremely varied. To give the beginner an idea of this, I will mention a few of the more frequent examples. It will be seen that the calculation ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... intended, but as such castings always warp more or less in cooling, there is a great deal of fitting afterward required, to make them come rightly together. This could easily be done by machinery if the surfaces were square, or cylindrical, or of any other mathematical form to which the working of machinery could be adapted. But the curved and winding surfaces which form the hull of a boat or vessel, smooth and flowing as they are, and controlled, too, by established and well-known ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... strange shadow must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through the intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his father. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... as if by some unconscious piece of mechanism:—"Florence manufactures excellent silks, woollen cloths, elegant carriages, bronze articles, earthenware, straw hats, perfumes, essences, and candied fruits; also, all kinds of turnery and inlaid work, piano-fortes, philosophical and mathematical instruments, &c. The dyes used at this city are much admired, particularly the black, and its sausages are famous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... to the Greenwich meridian was based, on one side, on the historical right of the Royal Observatory of England, acquired by eminent services rendered by this establishment during the course of two centuries, to mathematical geography and navigation; on the other side, considering that the great majority of charts now in use upon all the seas are made according to this meridian, and about 90 per cent. of the navigators of long standing are accustomed to take their longitude ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... planning what a farm should be like! Do you suppose I am going to let these visions become contaminated by practical knowledge? Not by a long way! I have, in the silent watches of the night, reduced the art to mathematical exactness, and I can show you the figures. Don't ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... account for the failure of a considerable percentage of adults to pass the test. Visual imagery, however, is not absolutely necessary to success. One 8-year-old prodigy, who had 12-year intelligence, arrived in forty seconds at a strictly mathematical solution for the second problem, as follows: "If it is 2.46, and the hands trade places, then the little hand has gone about one fourth of the distance from 9 o'clock to 10 o'clock. One fourth of 60 minutes ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... peered from beneath bushy white brows out over the laboratory. To his near sighted eyes the blurred figure of Harper, his young assistant, seemed busily at work over his mathematical charts. Gault hoped sourly that the young man was actually working and not just drawing more of his absurd, senseless designs amidst ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... was thankful it was then, and the cause of it was that Mr. Burton had a mathematical mind in which figures seemed ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... bottom of such sugared words, till I caught a lady of condition yesterday turning to the window, and praying fervently for the girl's conversion to christianity, all from a tender and pious emotion of her gentle heart: as notwithstanding their caresses, no man is more firmly persuaded of a mathematical truth than they are of mine, and my maid's living in a state of certain and eternal reprobation—ma fanno veramente vergogna a noi altri[Footnote: But they really shame even us.], say they, quite in the spirit of the old Romans, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... walked around the block, arriving again opposite the Carvel house, and beside Mr. Renault's, which was across from it. Eliphalet had inherited the principle of mathematical chances. It is a fact that the discreet sometimes take chances. Towards the back of Mr. Renault's residence, a wide area was sunk to the depth of a tall man, which was apparently used for the purpose of getting coal and wood into the cellar. Mr. Hopper swept the neighborhood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the progress of thought we come to form terms in which the intensive capacity is everything. Of this kind notably are mathematical conceptions. Terms of this kind, as we said before, lend ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... not so infinitely complex and involved, if we were in a position to take a complete view of the historical evolution of the psychic functions, we could reduce the whole of them (including consciousness) to a mathematical "soul-formula." ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... nearly a quarter, in the second by nearly half, the estimated 600,000 tons, and for the present month also we may fairly cherish the best expectations. The technical success guarantees the economic success with almost mathematical exactitude. True, the economic results cannot be so easily expressed numerically and set down in a few big figures as the technical result in the amount of tonnage sunk. The economic effects of the submarine warfare are expressed in many different spheres covering a wide area, where the enemy ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... come to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young man proceeded, in the same cool, mild, deliberate tone, as if he were demonstrating a mathematical solution, "you ought to know that your connexion with all these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don't at all. They were imposed upon ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder: such power is separated by the very extent of it from our mental operations. But when we further observe that these feats are attended by little or no fatigue,—that this is the play, not the tension of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... we girls viewed these occupations in the light of furnishings for our room, we felt sure we could squeeze them in—and we did. I got six beginners, and Rose captured the Cowans, root and branch—four instead of two; for it seemed they were not proficient in mathematical pursuits, and their mother was delighted to get them off her distracted hands. All our friends know that Rose adores sums and problems, and she didn't need any ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... never seem to be aware of the impatient murmurs around them. What administrative calmness beams on the fresh faces of these distributors of consolation and of despair! In the agony of waiting, minutes lose their mathematical value, and the hands of the clock become motionless on the dial like impaled serpents. The operations of the office proceed with a slowness that seems like a miniature eternity. This anxious crowd stand in single file, forming a living ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... enough attitude, perhaps, on the part of an eristic philosopher speculating on politics in the silent shade of academic groves, but hardly suitable for a practical politician who has to take action on one of the most burning questions of our time. Human affairs are not governed by mathematical reasoning. You cannot demonstrate the precise results of any legislative measure beforehand as you can demonstrate the course of a planet in the solar system. "Probability," as Bishop Butler says, "is the guide of life;" and an older philosopher than Butler has ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... feet from each other, although if there had been time to prolong the tunnel, the distance should have been at least forty in order to give the stuff a wider range of action. According to Oliver's mathematical reckoning, they were cut in the exact centre of the base of the idol, and about thirty feet below the actual body of the crouching sphinx. As a matter of fact this reckoning was wrong in several particulars, the ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... rosewood desk, whose belongings, arranged with mathematical precision, indicated the methodical business habits of its owner, sat Hugh Mainwaring, senior member of the firm of Mainwaring & Co., a man approaching his fiftieth birthday. His dress and manners, less pronouncedly English than those of the remaining two, betokened the polished man of the ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... wheeled about and began to circle in the opposite direction. Twice they repeated this motion, their snarls growing louder. But still they did not come together, and the distance of five feet between them was maintained with an almost mathematical precision. It was magnificent, but it was not war. Then the setter, pausing in his walk, turned his head slowly from his enemy. The collie sniffed the air and pretended an interest in an old shoe lying in the gutter. Gradually and with all the dignity of monarchs they moved away from each ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... seemed to look,—the feet separated, so that they seemed to walk. Greek art is thus, almost from the first, essentially distinguished from the art of Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in organic form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian art had held by mathematical or mechanical proportions exclusively. The Greek apprehends of it, as the main truth, that it is a living organism, with freedom of movement, and hence the infinite possibilities of motion, and of expression by motion, with which the imagination credits the higher sort of Greek sculpture; while the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... docuerunt, solis Apsida Terris esse propiorem, quam Ptolemaei aetate duodecem partibus, i. e. uno & triginta terrae semidiameteris. [Copernicus in his Book of Revolutions, and afterwards Reinholdus, very cleverly showed by mathematical means that the perihelion of the earth was (become) nearer in the twelve centuries since Ptolemy, that is, thirty-one times the radius of the earth.] — Jo. Bod. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... it was impossible to imagine it agitated by any passion except thirst for knowledge. The skin was as white as marble; the profile was straight and mathematical, the mouth a straight line, the chin as square as that of a chiselled Fate. The jaw was prominent, powerful, relentless. The eyes were deeply set and gray as polished steel. The large brow was luminous, very full—an index to the terrible intellect ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... present methods of teaching this subject in the public schools. In the main their criticisms were to the effect that the teaching was not "practical." "The boys I get may know arithmetic," said one, "but they haven't any mathematical sense." Another cited his experience with an apprentice who was told to cut a bar eight and one-half feet long into five pieces of equal length. He was not told the length of the bar, but was given the direct order: "Cut that bar into five ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... effects; turn a mill without wind or water, or set in motion some mimic vehicle without other force than that the contrivance itself supplied. And here, at every step, new obstacles arose. It was the misfortune to science in those days, not only that all books and mathematical instruments were enormously dear, but that the students, still struggling into light, through the glorious delusions of alchemy and mysticism, imagined that, even in simple practical operations, there were peculiar virtues ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... survived to reach the age of eighteen, a tall, flat-chested, weak-witted butt of the local school, who, while able to struggle along with the ordinary studies at the foot of the class, was yet so poorly endowed with the mathematical sense that he could only master the first four rules of arithmetic. Fractions and decimals were unsolvable mysteries to him. His name was Quinbey—first name John, ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... pertaining to the reason can be multiplied to infinity: thus mathematical quantities have no limit. For the same reason the species of numbers are infinite, since, given any number, the reason can think of one yet greater. But desire of the end is consequent on the apprehension of the reason. Therefore it seems that there ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... how, from the commencement, the absolute, the mathematical as it is called, nowhere finds any sure basis in the calculations in the Art of War; and that from the outset there is a play of possibilities, probabilities, good and bad luck, which spreads about with all the coarse ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. [Greek: Hoi kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]—the dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. What ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... logic in love, nor the least mathematical element, it is simply natural that she shall fashion the result who has the wielding of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... that time, and scarcely any old one, ventured to address Mr. Speaker without being equipped with a Latin passage. Ferrars, in this respect, was triply armed. Indeed, when he entered public life, full of hope and promise, though disciplined to a certain extent by his mathematical training, he had read very little more than some Latin writers, some Greek plays, and some treatises of Aristotle. These with a due course of Bampton Lectures and some dipping into the "Quarterly Review," then ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Cavour drive would have averted: the Fitzgerald Contraction. Time aboard the great starships that lanced through the void was contracted; the nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to last only six weeks to the men on the ship, thanks to the strange mathematical effects of interstellar travel ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... between two points," and the further statement that "AB is a straight line between A and B," and conclude that the line AB represents the shortest distance between two points A and B. In a manner similar to this Euclid built his whole mathematical system upon the basis of definitions and postulates, a system the complexity and thoroughness of which has caused all students of mathematics at one time or another to marvel and admire. But, of course, a definition is little more than ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... of a modern Major-Gineral, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral; I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical; About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, With interesting facts about the square of the hypotenuse, I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous. In short, in matters ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... was, Tom Fillot was quicker; and turning sharply round, he struck out with his double fist, catching the American right in the centre of his forehead, with the result mathematical that two moving bodies meeting fly off ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... that resolves it into points of force will seem to many as doing away with matter no less effectually than the Berkeleyan Idealism. A universe of inane mathematical points, attracting and repelling each other, must appear to the ordinary mind a sorry substitute for the firm-set earth, and the majestically-fretted vault of heaven, with its planets, stars, and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... rivers in the tender, or in boats. Its error from mean Greenwich time, at noon July 17, was 2' 38.71" slow, and its rate of losing per day 4.41". This error and rate were given me by Mr. Bayly, mathematical master of the naval academy at Portsmouth, who had the kindness to take charge of the watch ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... career towards disintegration. It might have been thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the trouble that affects it, both organic and emotional. The expert like Barron can tell what each wave means, just as he can tell what the lines in a spectrum mean. He can see the invisible, hear the inaudible, feel the intangible, with mathematical precision. Barron has now read the electro-cardiograms. Each is a picture of the beating of the heart that made it, and each smallest variation has a meaning to him. Every passion, every emotion, every disease, is recorded with inexorable truth. The person with murder in his heart cannot ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... for I've nothing to do all day, I find. I'm not in for the Nightingale, or for the Mathematical Medal, or for the English Literature. Simon's in for that, you know, so there's no ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... than he who describes them solely from the picture that exists in his fancy. We wish to be rightly understood. We do not mean that vagueness and generality are essential to poetical description. As on the one hand, mathematical accuracy, by allowing no play to the imagination, produces a feeble impression, so on the other the indistinctness arising from indefinite expressions is equally unfavorable. But in neither is the poetry of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before, and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by market and crop reports. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time, and with more ease than was ever dreamed ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... went over to the drafting table, tacked down a huge sheet of paper, and sketched rapidly, explaining as he drew. Soon the two men were engaged in a profound mathematical argument. Sheet after sheet of paper was filled with equations and calculations, and the table was covered with reference books. After two hours of intense study and hot discussion Crane's face took on a look of dawning comprehension, ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... my notice, even before I began the study of medicine, that whether disease were coaxed with doses too small for mathematical estimate, or whether blown out with solid shot or blown up with shells, the percentage of recoveries seemed to be about the same regardless of the ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... aetherial medium will agree with our experience; and, as the natural result, several outstanding problems will be explained on a physical basis, which at the present time cannot be satisfactorily explained except from the mathematical standpoint. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... New York and Charleston factors, the Charleston Courier and Mercury and the New York Journal of Commerce. The latter sheet, at the date of which I am writing, was in wide circulation at the South, its piety (!) and its politics being then calculated with mathematical precision for ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... and rare productions. Then are torches lighted, and two by two the long train of torch-bearers defiles through the silent midnight streets to the sound of solemn music, and passing by the dark cemetery of the real dead, bear through 'Tutor's Lane' the coffin of their mathematical ancestor. They climb the hill beyond, and commit him to the flames, invoking Pluto, in Latin prayer, and chanting a final dirge, while the flare of torches, the fearful grotesqueness of each uncouth disguised wight, and the dark background of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Areopagite, which in agreement with Colet he had set out to prove. In London was Linacre, just returned from Venice, full of Aldus' Greek Aristotle; to a supplementary volume of which he had sent a translation of Proclus' Sphere, a mathematical work then highly esteemed. He had been working on Aristotelian commentators, and was soon to lecture on the Meteorologica—a course which More, who was working for the Bar in London, attended. More himself not long afterwards lectured publicly in London ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... that teaching a unity and individuality. It served as a sort of test, which the Anglican could not exhibit, that modern Rome was in truth ancient Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople, just as a mathematical curve has its own law ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... a mathematical instrument maker, of all people, called Smeaton. His lighthouse was even more soundly founded than even Rudyerd's had been, and he used the fact that stone is heavier than timber to add weight to the building, thus rendering it more resistant to the forces of wind and ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... in finding in the hitherto unexplored domains of nature what reason demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian skeleton, discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir William Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences of the undulation of light, led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. A similar story is told of Prof. Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zooelogist, the other the great mathematician, of Cambridge. Agassiz, having studied the formation ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... was holding his own; he was a good mathematical scholar, he prepared the lessons thoroughly, and he found it generally easy to keep order by assigning problems to be worked out in class. The weather continued good, so that during play time the fellows ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... rhythmical faults of the poem, even in these passages. But there is a vast difference between such blemishes of the unrhymed heroic measure as terminating a line with "and," "of," or "but," or inattention to the caesural pauses, and that mathematical precision of foot and accent, which, after all, can scarcely be distinguished from prose. Whatever may be his shortcomings, Mr. Heavysege speaks in the dialect of poetry. Only rarely he drops into bald prose, as in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... inarticulate growling protest, but Miss Slade took no notice and continued in even, dispassionate tones, as if she had been explained a mathematical problem. ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... forth, every thing seems to turn up just as I would have it if I had the ordering of events. I shall not pause to offer any philosophical conjectures as to the reason why we are invariably disappointed in our conclusions, (excepting they are mathematical ones) concerning the future; merely asking the amiable reader whether he ever knew such an anticipation to be exactly realized. I shall not stop to make any such conjectures, because I should only get deeper into the dark, and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... fleet began moving slowly up the river, under the pilotage of members of the Coast Survey, who, already partly familiar with the ground, were to push their triangulation up to the forts themselves and establish the position of the mortars with mathematical precision; a service they performed with courage and accuracy. The work of the surveyors was carried on under the guns of the forts and exposed to the fire of riflemen lurking in the bushes, who ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... applied to such subjects, that "Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri:" for all things have their peculiar beauty and sources of ornament—determined by their ultimate ends, and by the process of the mind in pursuing them. Here, as in the processes of nature and in mathematical demonstrations, the appropriate elegance is derived from the simplicity of the means employed, as expressed in the "Lex Parcimonie" ("Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri fas erat per pauciora"), and other maxims ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the part of Robert, what alternations of hope and fear! And Shargar was always the reflex of Robert, so far as Shargar could reflect Robert. Sometimes Robert would stop, stand still in the middle of the room, cast a mathematical glance of survey over its cubic contents, and then dart off in another inwardly suggested direction of search. Shargar, on the other hand, appeared to rummage blindly without a notion of casting the illumination of thought upon the field of search. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... can see the whole affair from that angle ... and I am beginning to believe that this is how one ought to see it. But, if we admit that this madwoman has the sort of mathematical logic which governed the murders of the six victims, I see no connection between the victims themselves. She struck at random. Why this victim rather ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... in full blossom. The stiff soil of these plains was here and there marked by very regular pentagonal, hexagonal, and heptagonal cracks, and, as these cracks retain the moisture of occasional rains better than the intervening space, they were fringed with young grass, which showed these mathematical figures very distinctly. We passed a great number of dry swamps or swampy water-holes; sometimes however containing a little water. They were surrounded by the Mangrove myrtle (Stravadium), which was mentioned as ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Thirty Kalas, with the tenth part of a Kala added, make what is known as a Muhurta. Thirty Muhurtas make up one day and night. Thirty days and nights are called a month, and twelve months are called a year. Persons conversant with mathematical science say that a year is made up of two ayanas (dependent on sun's motion), viz., the northern and the southern. The sun makes the day and the night for the world of man. The night is for the sleep of all living creatures, and the day ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... presented on the spot to Elvira, and who divided the journey between licking himself and devouring the fragments of biscuit with which Jock supplied him. Allen had also bought a beautiful statuette for himself, and a set of studs. Janet had set herself up with a case of mathematical instruments and various books; Bobus's purchases were divers chemical appliances and a pocket microscope, also what he thrust into Jessie's lap and she presently proclaimed to be a lovely little work-case; Jessie herself was hugging a parcel, which turned out ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what they were—the deadliest weapon that the war had till then produced. An officer who watched them the following day gallop onto the field, unlimber and start firing, told me that the way their fire covered that front was an absolutely uncanny sight. With mathematical precision the shells would begin to drop at one end of a field and cut out a belt across it from side to side, the belt growing as each explosion threw up a splash of dust from the showers of shrapnel; having completed the ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... of the first volume of 'The Laws of Fesole' I have laid down the mathematical principles of rightly drawing maps;—principles which for many reasons it is well that my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, and must not, if you draw countries on the unsplit skin, stretch ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... for the whole Army of the Potomac. Climbing up the steep road to the top of the bluff, and advancing over the undulating plain a mile, you come to a city,—the city of hospitals. The white tents are arranged in lines of almost mathematical accuracy. The camp is intersected by roads broad and clean. Every corps, and every division of every corps, has its allotted square. Somewhere in these larger squares your eye will be sure to catch sight of the Sanitary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... incident connected with my mathematical studies still comes back to me with a pleasant impression. My chief college friend was young De Saussure, grandson of the naturalist of that name, who, the first with a single exception, reached the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... must inhale the golden legendary air of the Past. The mere humanitarian bards, who try to make modern life trip to the music of trochees, dactyles, and spondees, fail miserably. Industrialism is not poetical. Our modern life expresses itself in machines, in mathematical formulas, in statistics and with scientific precision generally. Art and poetry are pursued in the spirit of past ages, and concern themselves with the symbols, faiths, and ideal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... this gate at Lucca, of the vault at Verona, of this window at Orvieto, and of the contemporary refectory at Furness Abbey, are a main source of the pleasure you have in the building. Nay, they are not merely engravers' lines, but, in finest practice, they are mathematical lines —length without breadth. Here in my hand is a little shaft of Florentine mosaic executed at the present day. The separations between the stones are, in dimension, mathematical lines. And the two sides of the thirteenth century porch of St. Anastasia at Verona are built ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... James's Park, where we observed the several engines at work to draw up water, with which sight I was very much pleased. Above all the rest, I liked that which Mr. Greatorex [A mathematical instrument maker.] brought, which do carry up the water with a great deal of ease. Here, in the Park, me met with Mr. Salisbury, who took Mr. Creed and me to the Cockpitt to see "The Moore of Venice," which was well ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Toscanelli, returning from his studies, and chancing one evening to be at supper in a garden with some of his friends, invited Filippo, who, hearing him discourse on the mathematical arts, formed such an intimacy with him that he learnt geometry from Messer Paolo; and although Filippo had no learning, he reasoned so well in every matter with his instinct, sharpened by practice and experience, that he would many times confound him. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... extensive gardens, which afterwards became the residence of Major Armstrong and now occupied by Mrs. Howland. Notwithstanding his heavy parochial work Mr. Clarke (as the present writer can testify) kept up his classical and mathematical studies. He was also devoted to music, and a very skilful performer on the flute. Although these were relaxations from his more serious parochial labours, the amount of mental work involved eventually told upon his health, and in the 8th year of his vicariate it became perceptible, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... known to Egyptologists as the Old Empire. Kings of the Fourth dynasty, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura, built the great pyramids of Giza, the largest of which is still one of the wonders of the world. Its huge granite blocks are planed with mathematical exactitude, and, according to Professor Flinders Petrie, have been worked by means of tubular drills fitted with the points of emeralds or some equally hard stone. It was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover the instrument ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce |
