"Mathematician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... stream, and we were friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that they were as brown ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... had nevertheless some antecedents. M. Cauchy, a few years previously President of the Chamber of the Royal Court of Paris, an amiable man and easily frightened, was the brother of the mathematician, member of the Institute, to whom we owe the computation of waves of sound, and of the ex-Registrar Archivist of the Chamber of Peers. M. Delapalme had been Advocate-General, and had taken a prominent part in the Press trials under the Restoration; M. Pataille had been Deputy ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... been the birthplace of many learned men—as, Ortelius, an eminent mathematician and antiquary of the sixteenth century, and the friend of our Camden; Gorleus, a celebrated medallist, of the same period; Andrew Schott, a learned Jesuit, and the friend of Scaliger; Lewis Nonnius, a distinguished physician and erudite scholar, born early in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... least, there can be no supposition of dramatic fiction; the book from which I have made this extract was written by Arthur Hopton, a distinguished mathematician, a scholar of Oxford, a student in the Temple; and the volume itself is dedicated to "The Right Honourable Sir Edward Coke, Knight, Lord Chiefe ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... easily offended and which revolted at the slightest insignificant provocation; a passionate impetuosity in solving world problems; fits of melancholy alternated by equally wild fits of merriment—all this gave the young mathematician a character of extreme unsteadiness, of sad ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... the American colleges during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the wave of enthusiasm which attended this introduction was unfortunately not sufficiently tempered by emphasis on good teaching and breadth of knowledge, especially as regards applications. In fact, the leading mathematician in America during the early part of this period was glaringly weak along these lines. By means of his bountiful enthusiasm he was able to do a large amount of good for the selected band of gifted students who attended his lectures, but some of these were not so fortunate in securing ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... chance of 12 per cent or nothing, as compared with a certainty of 6 per cent, does not mean that the risk in the former case is paid for to the tune of 6 per cent. It means that it is not paid for at all. In each case what a mathematician would call the expectation is a return of 6 per cent. The odds are evenly balanced; in the long run, over a large number of cases, if the law of averages works as we assume it does, you would ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... were wave motion, there must have been a medium to propagate the waves. In order to account for this wave motion, he supposed all space to be filled with a luminiferous Aether, which would be to his light waves what air is to sound waves. In this conception he was supported by Euler the mathematician, and in 1690 he was able to give a satisfactory explanation of the reflection and refraction of light, on the hypothesis that light was due to wave motion in the Aether. It was not, however, till the advent of Thomas Young, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... this active, prosperous, enterprising state, and at the period of its highest activity, that Thales, statesman, practical engineer, mathematician, philosopher, flourished. Without attempting to fix his date too closely, we may take it that he was a leading man in Miletus for the greater part of the {3} first half of the sixth century before Christ. We hear of an eclipse predicted by him, of the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonist of Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of his disciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled the numbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great Harvard mathematician, came over from Cambridge, and read us one of his Lowell Institute lectures, on the Ideality of Mathematics. He had a most distinguished presence and an eye, as was said, of black fire. The Harvard undergraduates of my ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... death,—that actually happened also; but it belongs artistically in the "Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation of the "Immortal"—the taking in of a savant by a lot of forged manuscripts—has been falsified by changing the savant from a mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... as they are, may tend, in some degree, to illustrate the question of the populousness of ancient Rome. I. When the capital of the empire was besieged by the Goths, the circuit of the walls was accurately measured, by Ammonius, the mathematician, who found it equal to twenty-one miles. [67] It should not be forgotten that the form of the city was almost that of a circle; the geometrical figure which is known to contain the largest space within any given circumference. II. The architect Vitruvius, who flourished in the Augustan age, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... outer boundary of the solar system was again extended by the discovery that a great planet circulated beyond Uranus. The new body, which received the name of Neptune, was brought to light as the result of calculations made at the same time, though quite independently, by the Cambridge mathematician Adams, and the French astronomer Le Verrier. The discovery of Neptune differed, however, from that of Uranus in the following respect. Uranus was found merely in the course of ordinary telescopic survey of the heavens. The position of Neptune, on the other hand, was predicted as ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of "four-dimensional" things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more common-place statement than that the world in which we live is ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... it modestly enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. But that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections, he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of Glastonbury, Conn., was one of five sisters of a somewhat notable family, the father and mother both having strong traits of character and marked individuality. The mother, Hannah Hickok, was a fine linguist and mathematician. She once made an almanac for her own convenience, almanacs being rather scarce in those days. She could tell the time of night whenever she happened to awake by the position of the stars. She was an omnivorous ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the greatest man of antiquity. He was at one and the same time a general, a statesman, a lawgiver, a jurist, an orator, a poet, a historian, a philologer, a mathematician, and an architect. He was equally fitted to excel in every thing, and has given proofs that he would have surpassed almost all other men in any subject to which he devoted the energies of his extraordinary mind. One fact places his genius ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... ready and willing, so far as his professions went.. I saw no reason to refuse his services, and he was accordingly engaged at $300 per annum, to rank second to William L. Farquhar. Farquhar was a capital navigator and excellent mathematician; ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... which would have puzzled Euclid or Sir Isaac Newton himself; but even these trained their minds to habits of acuteness and investigation. When a schoolmaster of this class had established himself as a good mathematician, the predominant enjoyment of his heart and life was to write the epithet Philomath after his name; and this, whatever document he subscribed, was never omitted. If he witnessed a will, it was Timothy Fagan, Philomath; if he put his name to a promissory ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... crept into Lance Cooper's voice, despite his effort to keep it out. Hell, he was just a pilot; not a rated mathematician. He'd fly hyperspace by the seat of his ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... on the fair surface of art. But he was a born colorist, and sought to arouse the imagination by stupendous orchestral effects, frescoes of tone wherein might be discerned terrifying perspectives, sinister avenues of drooping trees melting into iron dusks. If Pobloff was a mathematician, he was also a painter-poet. He did not credit the theory of the alienists, that the confusion of tone and color—audition coloree—betrayed the existence of a slight mental lesion; and he laughed consumedly at the notion of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... says the philosopher. "Therefore," as the mathematician would say, "love is the universe." To that ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... wise and prudent, the vision that this is still God's world, in which, for all the learned data we have collected, there are still the almost untapped reservoirs of human possibilities awaiting not the test tubes of the scientist or formulas of the mathematician to bring them out, but merely the spirit of redemptive love as we have ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... "Ever try to get a definition of life from a biologist?" he asked. "Or a definition of number from a mathematician?" ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... proportion as this parallel has already been long-drawn and exact. This is one of those anomalous propositions which, seemingly appealing to thought altogether apart from the mathematical, is yet one which only the mathematician can fully entertain. Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his medical knowledge as a Licentiate of the Apothecaries' Company, London, his theory as a Mathematician, and his practice as a Working Optician, aided by Smee's Optometer, in the selection of Spectacles suitable to every derangement of vision, so as to preserve the sight to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... was an eclipse of the sun which they conceive to be that seen by Antimachus, the Teian poet, in the third year of the sixth Olympiad. In the times of Varro the philosopher, a man deeply read in Roman history, lived one Tarrutius, his familiar acquaintance, a good philosopher and mathematician, and one, too, that out of curiosity had studied the way of drawing schemes and tables, and was thought to be a proficient in the art; to him Varro propounded to cast Romulus's nativity, even to the first day and hour, making his deductions from the several events of the man's life which he ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... have been to have given you a definition of chemistry, it is still more difficult to give you a detail of all the qualities necessary for a chemical philosopher. I will not name as many as Athenaeus has named for a cook, who, he says, ought to be a mathematician, a theoretical musician, a natural philosopher, a natural historian, &c., though you had a disposition just now to make chemistry merely subservient to the uses of the kitchen. But I will seriously mention some of the studies ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... be built here, but the sliding flat roof answers the purpose as well. You may find a senior who wishes to take astronomy, but I fear that most of your effort must be expended in drilling elementary mathematics into recalcitrant freshmen and sophomores. Your predecessor was a good mathematician as far as he went, but he did n't go as far as the stars. He tried it once, and fell, like Icarus, into the sea. In other words, he published something based upon insufficient data, I believe, which reflected no credit on the college. Then he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... John Dee is scarcely known to-day, yet Dr. Dee has some exceedingly well-defined claims to remembrance. He was one of the foremost scientists of the Tudor period in English history. He was famed as a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher not only in his native land but in every European center of learning. Before he was twenty he penned a remarkable treatise on logic, and he left behind him at his death a total of nearly a hundred works on all manner of recondite ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... thoughtful man maintained the fixed opinion that, at a certain stage in the history of the solar system, the sun's radiation had suffered diminution, the glacial epoch being a consequence of this solar chill. The celebrated French mathematician Poisson had another theory. Astronomers have shown that the solar system moves through space, and 'the temperature of space' is a familiar expression with scientific men. It was considered probable by Poisson that our system, during its motion, had traversed ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Paris, his commercial dealings, and his inquisitiveness into the processes of all trades and handicrafts by which men earn their livings. He came back a tall, slender youth, with a very large head, to be spoken of in London as an encyclopaedia of information, a wonderful mathematician and mechanician, teeming with schemes of all sorts, and yet shrewd, practical, and business-like. He was an invaluable addition to the Invisible College, and a delightful discovery for Hartlib; and he took to Hartlib at once, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... point to make, but forgot it (oh, those squinting waiters!), showing that 1894 was a very unlucky year. However, any mathematician could prove that '94 9 4 13. Q.E.D. I might also have really utilised only thirteen words in giving the toast of the evening, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... all the material sciences together into one, so in the world of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action find their common bond in literature. Even the {4} signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing—the stenography of those exact sciences. The simple chronicles of the annalist, the flowing verses of the poet, clothing his thought with winged ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to see and to say that Columbus himself was singularly well fitted to take the charge of the expedition of discovery. He was an excellent sailor and at the same time he was a learned geographer and a good mathematician. He was living in Portugal, the kings of which country had, for many years, fostered the exploration of the coast of Africa, and were pushing expeditions farther and ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... uncertainty which attends all inquiries in the historical sciences. Though a historical fact may be recorded in the most trustworthy documents, though it may have happened in our own times, though we may have seen it happen with our own eyes, yet we cannot have the same certainty about it as the mathematician has about the proposition which he proves to absolute demonstration. We cannot have even that lower degree of certainty which the geologist has with regard to the order of succession between this and that stratum. For in all historical inquiries we are dealing with facts ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... a very good Mathematician, and a Linguist; could speak French and Spanish; and in the three Days they remain'd in the Boat, (for so long were they going from the Ship to the Plantation) he entertain'd Oroonoko so agreeably with his Art and Discourse, that he was no less pleas'd with Trefry, than he was with ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... sprung Simson the mathematician, Bacon the sculptor, the two Milners, Adam Walker, John Foster, Wilson the ornithologist, Dr. Livingstone the missionary traveller, and Tannahill the poet. Shoemakers have given us Sir Cloudesley Shovel the great Admiral, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... country, ever held in existence by main human force against the elements, the arts of engineering, hydrostatics and kindred branches were of necessity much cultivated. It was reserved for the young mathematician to make them as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... things a metaphysician. That does not mean that his head was in the clouds, or that the particular sciences lacked interest for him. Not at all—he felt a lively concern for theological debate, he was a mathematician of the first rank, he made original contributions to physics, he gave a realistic attention to moral psychology. But he was incapable of looking at the objects of any special enquiry without seeing them as aspects or parts of one intelligible ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... his frequent and attentive inspection of mirrors. If you had only read this book, Aemilianus, and, instead of devoting yourself to the study of your fields and their dull clods, had studied the mathematician's slate and blackboard, believe me, although your face is hideous enough for a tragic mask of Thyestes, you would assuredly, in your desire for the acquisition of knowledge, look into the glass and sometimes leave your plough to marvel at the numberless ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... little balls of clay. He had delineated a segment of a circle on the wall with chalk, and marked their different vibrations by intersecting it with cross lines. A decent-looking man came up, and smiling at the maniac, turned to Harley, and told him that gentleman had once been a very celebrated mathematician. "He fell a sacrifice," said he, "to the theory of comets; for having, with infinite labour, formed a table on the conjectures of Sir Isaac Newton, he was disappointed in the return of one of those luminaries, and was very soon after obliged to be placed here ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... celebrated mathematician, who was born in Alexandria, in Egypt, about two hundred and eighty years before Christ. He distinguished himself by his writings on music and geometry. The most celebrated of his works is his Elements ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenly to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It is only the t-th moment that counts—that which flows throughout the intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately what really happens we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... permanently lost? If not, you must find it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do so in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at least, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemical laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... his hand to any thing, but he cannot be idle. There are few intellectual accomplishments which he does not possess, and possess in a very high degree. He speaks French (and, we believe, several other modern languages) fluently: is a capital mathematician, and obtained an introduction to the celebrated Carnot in this latter character, when the conversation turned on squaring the circle, and not on the propriety of confining France within the natural boundary of the Rhine. Mr. Brougham is, in fact, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... vain. I thought different, could I be wrong now? And you're going to meet Captain Campbell's most darling wish. Eh? You have begun the trade early, and I could well desire you had a better head for the counts. Give me the mathematician and I will make something of him; give me a boy like yourself, with his head stuffed with feathers and the airs of heaven blowing them about through the lug-holes and—my work's hopeless. Laddie, laddie, go to your task! If you become ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... on that account; I had tutors in various branches of knowledge, under whom I made a tolerable progress; by the time I was eighteen I was able to read most of the Greek and Latin authors with facility; I was likewise, to a certain degree, a mathematician. I cannot say that I took much pleasure in my studies; my chief aim in endeavouring to accomplish my tasks was to give pleasure to my beloved parent, who watched my progress with anxiety truly maternal. My life ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... there is not a mathematician in the civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it can not possibly ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... was a strange conjunction; an imagination as spiritual as Shelley's, though, unlike Shelley's, haunted perpetually with shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin; with this, an analytic power, a scientific exactness, and a mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathematician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the selection of words in which the consonants alliterated and the vowels varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he described ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... certain lines meet so as to give the most room with the least material and have the greatest strength in the building? This problem is said to have been worked out by a Mr. McLaughland, a noted Scotch mathematician, who arrived at his conclusion by laborious and careful fluxionary calculation. To his surprise, and to the surprise of the world, such lines and such a building were found in the common bee cell. Now I hold that the same Creator who gave to the bee the mathematical ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... terrifying;—I mean the mere vague idea of that everlasting Night into which the blazing of millions of suns can bring neither light nor warmth. But to the intellect of Herbert Spencer the idea of Space must have presented itself after a manner incomparably more mysterious and stupendous. The mathematician alone will comprehend the full significance of the paragraph dealing with the Geometry of Position and the mystery of space-relations,—or the startling declaration that "even could we penetrate the mysteries of existence, there would remain still more transcendent mysteries." ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's with which he works his problems, for real entities—and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... assertion made by Spallanzani.—The same curiosity and the same preparation prevails with all imbued with the same spirit. In the other camp, among the Cartesians, about to disappear, Fontenelle is an excellent mathematician, the competent biographer of all eminent men of science, the official secretary and true representative of the Academy of Sciences. In other places, in the Academy of Bordeaux, Montesquieu reads discourses on the mechanism of the echo, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... classics and mathematics), it was strange how he disguised, not only his sense of superiority, but the appearance of it, so that his pupils felt him more as a fellow-student than as the refined scholar or mathematician which he was. This was partly owing to his carelessness of those formulae, the familiarity with which gives even second-rate lecturers a position of superiority which is less visible in those who, like their pupils, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... application of the modern kite has been conceived by Professor J. Woodbridge Davis, principal of the Woodbridge Boys' School, in New York, who is one of the most famous kite-flyers in the world, in addition to being a distinguished scientist and mathematician. It was Professor Davis who invented the dirigible kite several years ago, three strings allowing the operator to steer the kite from right to left at will or to make it sink to earth. Having perfected this curious kite, which is of hexagon ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... great men are spiritualists—even mystics. A materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way; but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an intellectual Antaeus—the moment his feet leave the sodden clay he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly whose sweet waters make ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... osteology are pure science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey,"[80] touches none but the aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, and even many persons who are not great mathematicians, will tell you that they derive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings. Everybody knows mathematicians speak of solutions and problems as "elegant," and they tell you that a certain mass of mystic ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 1863, a book was written by Mrs. de Morgan, the wife of the well-known mathematician Professor de Morgan, entitled "From Matter to Spirit." There is a sympathetic preface by the husband. The book is still well worth reading, for it is a question whether anyone has shown greater brain power in ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humorist of ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the Greeks and other nations had occupied themselves to ascertain and measure its proportions, he said it had never hitherto been regarded as a body, to be anatomized or explored in its internal parts. Some years ago, it had occurred to a French mathematician that the cube was divisible into six pyramidical forms; and it therefore had struck him, the inventor, that the natural formation of that figure was by a combination of those forms. Having detailed to his audience a number of experiments, and shown how the results thereby obtained ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the limits of probability and proof. Es- pecially remarkable is the fact that the concept of *the proved is very various in various sciences, and it would be absorbing to establish the difference between what is called proved and what only probable in a number of given examples by the mathematician, the physicist, the chemist, the physician, the naturalist, the philologist, the historian, the philosopher, the lawyer, the theologian, etc. But this is no task for us and nobody is called upon to determine ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist's own." Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, and in this connection these ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... book appeared the works of Aristotle were introduced to the attention of students, translated into Latin from the Saracenic language. Aristotle had already been commented upon by Arabian scholars in Spain,—among whom Averroes, a physician and mathematician of Cordova, was the most distinguished,—who regarded the Greek philosopher as the founder of scientific knowledge. His works were translated from the Greek into the Arabic in the early ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... to his knees as fatigue and reaction caught up with him again, but his mind churned over the new evidence. As a mathematician, he was sure such things could not exist. If they did, there would have been extension of math well in advance of the perfection of the machines, and he'd have known of it as speculative theory, at least. Yet, without such evidence, the ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... distance from a given straight line. According to the canon, therefore, this curve should be beautiful; and it is acknowledged to be 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... age was not scrupulous in such matters, it was one of the last words befitting the lips of the reverend Catholic; and that, when Ippolito of Este (as Ginguene observes) made that speech to the great poet, "he uttered—prince, cardinal, and mathematician as ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... matter to use this most current of all commodities, with which all others are most frequently compared, as a measure of the relative values of all other exchangeable commodities. There is need of such a measure, and it is analogous to the want experienced by the mathematician who has a column of fractions to sum up, and who does it by first reducing them all to a common denominator. (Storch.)(688) A person entrusted with the duty of assessing the values of two hundred different articles would be obliged, if he had no such ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... follow, how I can maintain these two positions at once. And to that I make, in the first place, this general answer: Sociology is still of necessity a very vague body of approximate truths. We have not the data necessary for obtaining anything like precise laws. A mathematician can tell you precisely what he means when he speaks of bodies moving under the influence of an attraction which varies inversely as the square of the distance. But what are the attractive forces which hold together the body politic? ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... observed limits. There was nothing at all unreasonable about this assumption, for the amount of energy in a swiftly moving body capable of being transformed into heat if the body be arrested is relatively enormous. Thus it is calculated that a pound of coal dropped into the sun from the mathematician's favorite starting-point, infinity, would produce some six thousand times the heat it could engender if merely burned at the sun's surface. In other words, if a little over two pounds of material from infinity were to fall into each square yard of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... surely aware—the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Bruges, fifty feet broad, solidly paved in the middle, seems, like all French and Flemish roads, to have been laid out by some inflexible mathematician: they are always right lines, the shortest possible between two points. The rows of trees on each side of these never-ending avenues are of the ugliest sort and figure possible: tall poplars stripped almost to the top, as you would ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... scientific communication had little or no facility; the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all meeting in the single person of the physician. In those days a superior physician was supposed to be cultivating magic; while curing ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... and the Hon. Judith (born Noel), daughter of Lord Wentworth. She was an heiress, and in succession to a peerage in her own right (becoming Baroness Wentworth in 1856). She was a pretty girl of "a perfect figure," highly educated, a mathematician, and, by courtesy, a poetess. She had rejected Byron's first offer, but, believing that her cruelty had broken his heart and that he was an altered man, she was now determined on marriage. High-principled, but self-willed and opinionated, she believed that she held her future in her own ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... was that the affair was, simply, X-traordinary and in-X-plicable. Even the town mathematician confessed that he could make nothing of so dark a problem. X, every. body knew, was an unknown quantity; but in this case (as he properly observed), there was an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... disclosures as to the plans for insurrection even then entertained by him and his colleagues. Buonaparte made him a general of division, and he subsequently received further promotion in the French army. In 1809 he married a niece of Marshal Grouchy, daughter of the Marquis Condorcet, the French mathematician. In 1834, he was permitted by Earl Grey, then in power in England, to revisit Ireland for the purpose of disposing of some property inherited by him, and which the British government had not confiscated. With the proceeds he ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... but there is reason to believe, from a passage in Virgil [269], that it was little cultivated by the Romans; and it is certain, that in the reformation of the calendar, Julius Caesar was chiefly indebted to the scientific knowledge of (158) Sosigenes, a mathematician of Alexandria. The laws of the solar system were still but imperfectly known; the popular belief, that the sun moved round the earth, was universally maintained, and continued until the sixteenth century, when the contrary was proved by Copernicus. There existed many celebrated tracts on mathematics; ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... of the astral and mental worlds is the same in kind as knowledge of the physical world; and it no more follows that a clairvoyant or clairaudient, or a man who can use any of the powers of subtler planes down here, has more authority on religious and moral questions than a good mathematician, a good electrician, or a good chemist. You are not likely, on the physical plane, to fall into the blunder of thinking that because a man is a good chemist he has authority on moral problems: you will at once see the absurdity. But many ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts but that was not among them. This dark ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... to hark back to the Aristarchian conception in the new scientific era that was now dawning was the noted cardinal, Nikolaus of Cusa, who lived in the first half of the fifteenth century, and was distinguished as a philosophical writer and mathematician. His De Docta Ignorantia expressly propounds the doctrine of the earth's motion. No one, however, paid the slightest attention to his suggestion, which, therefore, merely serves to furnish us with another interesting illustration of the futility of propounding even a correct hypothesis ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Ricci, the famous mathematician, chanced to be in Pisa, on his way from Rome to Milan, and gave a lecture at ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... extraordinary Frenchman of a lack of appreciation of the special sciences which were growing up. No one in his time had a better right to be called a scientist in the modern sense of the term. But it was not enough for him to be a mere mathematician, or even a worker in the physical sciences generally. He must be all that ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... allures me. What can a binomial theorem be, especially one whose author is Newton, the great English mathematician who weighed the worlds? What has the mechanism of the sky to do with this? Let us read and seek for enlightenment. With my elbows on the table and my thumbs behind my ears, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... undertook the government of the city. No course was left to the consul except to undertake a siege; but the skilful conduct of the defence, in which the Syracusan engineer Archimedes, celebrated as a learned mathematician, especially distinguished himself, compelled the Romans after besieging the city for eight months to convert the siege into a ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... died, the famous English mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, was born (1642-1727). He carried on the work of earlier astronomers by the application of higher mathematics, and proved that the force of attraction which we call gravitation was a universal one, and that the sun and the moon and the earth, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... violinist, a skilled mathematician and a profound scholar. Add to all these his spotless integrity and honor, his statesmanship, and his well curbed but aggressive patriotism, and he embodied within himself all the attributes of an ideal ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... twisted while the machine was in motion. He comes but a little way after Cody in the chronology of early British experimenters, but Cody, a born inventor, must be regarded as the pioneer of the present century so far as Britain is concerned. He was neither engineer nor trained mathematician, but he was a good rule-of-thumb mechanic and a man of pluck and perseverance; he never strove to fly on an imperfect machine, but made alteration after alteration in order to find out what was improvement and what was not, in consequence of which it was said of him that he was 'always ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... that you love her no longer, and have obtained certain proof of your indifference towards her—Oh, then I may listen to you!—These words must seem odious to you," she continued in an earnest voice; "and so indeed they are, but do not think that they have been pronounced by me. I am the rigorous mathematician who makes his deductions from a preliminary proposition. You are married, and do you deliberately set about making love to some one else? I should be mad to give any encouragement to a man ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... must not be thought that these so interesting facts are the result of groping in the dark and the outcome of some fortunate experiment; for they have, on the contrary, been foreseen and predetermined. Mr. Bjerknes is especially a mathematician, and it was a study, through calculation, of the vibratory motion of a body or system of bodies in a medium that led him to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... The heavy-set mathematician smiled pleasantly as MacHeath and Griffin came into the gun chamber. "I just thought I'd come down and see how you were getting along," he said. His voice was a low tenor, with just a touch of Midwestern ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the conservation of energy. This principle "has been assumed to admit of no exception; there is not an atom either in the nervous system or in the whole of the universe whose position is not determined by the sum of the mechanical actions which the other atoms exert upon it. And the mathematician who knew the position of the molecules or atoms of a human organism at a given moment, as well as the position and motion of all the atoms in the universe, capable of influencing it, could calculate with unfailing certainty the past, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Charles Hutton, the Woolwich mathematician. His note is a little in the vaunting vein of that "founder of fortun's," the excellent Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his services scarcely amounted to "initiating" Bewick or his master into the art of engraving on wood. Moreover, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... results of the science of anatomy, and the Talmud demonstrates that certain Mishna ordinances are based upon geometrical propositions, which could have been known to but few mathematicians of that time. Rabbi Gamaliel, said to have made use of a telescope, was celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer, and in 289 C. E., Rabbi Joshua is reported to have calculated the orbit of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... New World of Words was edited after his death, with numerous additions, by John Kersey, son of John Kersey the mathematician. Two years later Kersey threw the materials into another form and published it in an octavo, as Kersey's 'Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, or a General English Dictionary,' of which three editions appeared before 1721. ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... slowly answered: "I thought of that, but preferred to send him adrift rather than kill him, or let him kill me. Anyway he had only some fifty miles to travel to strike an Indian village. When he was there we were a hundred and fifty miles apart. You see I am a mathematician. It is a great joy to figure out what a long distance you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of this article were unimpeachable, but they were founded on the assumption that exceptional variations would only occur in single individuals, which is, indeed, often the case among those domesticated races on which Darwin especially studied the phenomena of variation. Darwin was no mathematician or physicist, and we are told in his biography that he regarded every tool-shop rule or optician's thermometer as an instrument of precision: so he appears to have regarded Fleeming Jenkin's demonstration as a mathematical deduction which he was ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... also a favourite travelling-companion. His name was Schaffner, and he, too, with his thick, black beard, was a handsome man. To those pupils who, like my brother Ludo, were pursuing the study of the sciences, he, the mathematician of the institute, must have been an unusually clear and competent teacher. I was under his charge only a short time, and his branch of knowledge was unfortunately my weak point. Shortly before my departure he married ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Every mathematician, every poet, and every dreamer has his own subjects of interest. Saint-Aignan, on leaving Guiche, found himself at the extremity of the grove,—at the very spot where the outbuildings of the servants begin, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... would be exhausted, perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must; it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client's situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter in a novel, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... into collision with Bramhall, Bishop of Londonderry, whom he completely overthrew. He was not, however, so successful in his mathematical controversies, one of the chief of which was on the Quadrature of the Circle. Here his antagonist was the famous mathematician Wallis, who was able easily to demonstrate his errors. In 1672, when 84, H. wrote his autobiography in Latin verse, and in the same year translated 4 books of the Odyssey, which were so well received ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Duke; and after discourse as usual with him in his closet, I went to my Lord's: the King and the Duke being gone to chapel, it being a collar day, Candlemas-day; where I staid with him until towards noon, there being Jonas Moore [Jonas Moore, a most celebrated mathematician, knighted by Charles II., and made Surveyor of the Ordnance. Ob. 1679.] talking about some mathematical businesses. With Mr. Coventry down to his chamber, where he did tell me how he do make himself an interest by doing business truly and justly, though he thwarts others greater than himself, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... for the Adrian Times, in which I stated the figures, and informed the citizens and tax-payers of Lenawee County that this orphan asylum was under the auspices of the American Missionary Association, which was responsible for its support. I solicited some mathematician to give us the fraction of a mill to each taxpayer as his share of this "intolerable burden upon ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... since he was not a Florentine, nor did he work here, being engaged chiefly at Urbino, Ferrara, Arezzo, and Rome. His life ended sadly, for he became totally blind. In addition to his painting he was a mathematician of much repute. The Duke of Urbino here depicted is Federigo da Montefeltro, who ruled from 1444 to 1482, and in 1459 married as his second wife a daughter of Alessandro Sforza, of Pesaro, the wedding being the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... short consideration which, independently of every other, convinces me that there is no solid foundation in Mr. Hume's conclusion, is the following. When a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with it is to try it upon a simple case, and if it produce a false result, he is sure that there must be some mistake in the demonstration. Now to proceed in this way with what may be called Mr. Hume's theorem. If twelve men, whose probity ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... for three, 100 for four, and so on. It is unnecessary to observe, with how many inconveniences such a system would be attended when reduced to practice. This discovery of the binary series, which the mathematician, in all probability, considered only as a philosophical plaything, was communicated to Father Bouvet the Jesuit who, happening at that time to be engaged in decyphering the lines of Fo-shee, caught the idea ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... had been standing all the time I spoke, and in an instant he said: "I am no mathematician. But I have had a ship ground to pieces under me on the Laccadives because our chronometer was wrong. You need $250,000 to build your first moon. I will be one of twenty men to furnish the money; or I ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... John Nider, Delrio, Lipsius, Bodin, Pererius, King James, &c. The learned and curious work of the melancholy Student of Christ Church and Oxford Rector has been deservedly commended by many eminent critics. That 'exact mathematician and curious calculator of nativities' calculated exactly, according to Anthony Wood (Athenae Oxon.), the period ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical fabrics of the old world, has some reason in common experience. Every man,—mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant,—looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... course of reading even advised and much less prescribed, is the best guidance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. Others before professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that the power of reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures and as the artist Dore was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pressure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous reading, which at ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... effusions of joy; and displayed a social triumph and exultation, which no private prosperity, even the greatest, is ever able fully to inspire. Traditions remain of men, particularly of Oughtred, the mathematician, who died of pleasure, when informed of this happy and surprising event. The King's declaration was well calculated to uphold the satisfaction inspired by the prospect of public settlement. It offered a general ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... the King's Bench for the State of New York. He was born at New York, 18th June, 1728. In his youth, he was sent to a grammar school, and afterwards to Yale College, Connecticut, where he greatly distinguished himself by his learning. He was an excellent Greek and Hebrew scholar, and a thorough mathematician. He was appointed Chief Justice of New York, 24th April, 1780. At the breaking out of the rebellion in 1775, he was a staunch Loyalist, and left New York in the same vessel with the King's troops and Sir Guy Carleton, and landed at Plymouth, 16th January, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... an art is not therefore to be a mathematician nor a political economist; still less to be a successful journalist, like Greeley, or a lecturer with a thousand annual invitations, like Gough. These careers have really no more to do with literature than has the stage or the bar. Indeed, a man may earn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... away. Marryat tied a string from his wrist to the door handle, and Babbage unfastened it. A thicker string was cut, a chain was unlinked by pliers, but at last the future captain forged a chain that was too stout for the future mathematician. Babbage, however, secured his revenge; as soon as his comrade was safely asleep he slipped a piece of pack thread through the chain and, carrying the other end to his own bed, was enabled by a few rapid jerks to waken Marryat whenever he chose. Apparently ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... for powers of conversation in the Baron de Nucingen than for the imagery of a poet in the brain of a mathematician. How many poets occur in an age, who are either good prose writers, or as witty in the intercourse of daily life as Madame Cornuel? Buffon was dull company; Newton was never in love; Lord Byron loved nobody but himself; Rousseau was gloomy and half crazy; La Fontaine absent-minded. Human energy, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the moment into its own image; and I have only to turn my attention upon myself at such a time to be able to understand a new mode of being, a new phase of human nature. In this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, musician, savant, monk, child, or mother. In these states of universal sympathy I have even seemed to myself sometimes to enter into the condition of the animal or the plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given plant. This faculty of ascending and descending ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was a great mathematician who said, 'Omit eternity in your estimate of area and your solution ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... a penetrating genius and a mind of restless energy, he was eminently qualified to profit by a comprehensive and liberal education. And such he received. His father, Nicon, an architect, was a man of learning and ability—a distinguished mathematician and an astronomer—and seems to have devoted much time and care to the education of his son. The youth appears to have studied philosophy successively in the schools of the Stoics, Academics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans, ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... generally; but now their prejudices were well nigh gone. And they had never been embittered against Christianity. And now they had come to feel strongly in its favor, and to look on skepticism both as a great error, and a terrible calamity. My youngest son was something of a genius. He was a clever mathematician, and an acute logician. And he would say to me sometimes, when he heard me uttering antichristian sentiments, "Father, I think you are wrong. I am sure you are wrong on that point; and if you will listen to me I think I can convince you that you are." And I did listen. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... especially from the Martyrdom of Saint Felicitas; the Transfiguration; Joseph explaining Pharaoh's Dream; and the School of Athens. Among the wonders of art with which the School of Athens abounds, we may select that of four youths attending to a sage mathematician, who is demonstrating some theorem. One of the boys is listening with profound reverence to the reasoning of his master; another discovers a greater quickness of apprehension; while the third is endeavouring to explain it to the last, who stands with a gaping countenance, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... letter that he speaks of Braham and his singing, and jokes "on titles of honour," exemplifying the eleven gradations, by which Mr. C. Lamb rose in succession to be Baron, Marquis, Duke, Emperor Lamb, and finally Pope Innocent; and other lively matters fit to solace an English mathematician self-banished to China. The same year Mary Lamb describes her brother taking to water like a hungry otter—abstaining from all spirituous liquors, but with the most indifferent result, as he became full of cramps and rheumatism, and so cold internally that fire could ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... with two odd characters to come together in one, an Astronomer and a Soldier, viz., Sir Thomas Brisbane, who enlivens his quarters wherever he goes by erecting an observatory immediately, and studying hard as any Cambridge mathematician every hour that he is not on military duty. His officers seem to have partaken in some degree of the spirit of their General, and to have made use of their position at Valenciennes to make themselves perfectly ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... mathematician and a physicist, and I found him freely communicative. He was so kind as to mention and explain to me the many various problems he had set before himself to work out. This caused my long slumbering and suppressed love for mathematics as ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... inexhaustible of thoughts and kept me ever curious and expectant. Nothing was too great, nothing too beautiful for his grasp or his expression, and as brilliant as his power of illustration was, he stuck like a mathematician to his truth and never added a syllable for display. I cannot tell you how much I have valued his conversation for these last two or three years, and he has never stopped growing, but has ripened from month to month. Indeed, the weight of his thoughts and the fresh and various ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... ether, light certainly is; but what does one mean by the term wave? The popular notion is, I suppose, of something heaving up and down, or, perhaps, of something breaking on the shore in which it is possible to bathe. But if you ask a mathematician what he means by a wave, he will probably reply that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... disadvantage if it does not. Intercourse is constantly taking place, and an awkward man of letters, in the society of a polished man of the world, is like a strong man contending with a skilful fencer. Mr. Addison says, that he once saw the ablest mathematician in the kingdom utterly embarrassed, from not knowing whether he ought to stand or sit when my lord duke drank ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... the tendency was to treat as not serious, as unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally different direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless this meant that I really did not have the intense devotion to science which I thought I had; for, if I had possessed such devotion, I would have carved out a career for myself ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... laughed, and said, "I see what you are looking at. Why, at school my head was beaten into a mass of bumps, because I could not point out Paris in a map of France." It is said that Spurzheim pronounced him to be a mathematician, and affirmed that he could not be a poet. Such opinion the great phrenologist could not have expressed; for undoubtedly he had a large organ of ideality, although at first it was not perceptible, in consequence of the great breadth and height ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... instinct that recognizes a disease and suggests its remedy, as much as an instinct that finds the right notes and harmonies for a composer of music, or the colors for a true artist's picture, or the results of figures for a mathematician. Men and women may learn these callings from others; may practice all the combinations until they can carry them through with a greater or less degree of unconsciousness of brain and fingers; but there is something needed beside ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Madras victorious, but in a state of health which rendered it impossible for him to remain there long. He married at this time a young lady of the name of Maskelyne, sister of the eminent mathematician, who long held the post of Astronomer Royal. She is described as handsome and accomplished; and her husband's letters, it is said, contain proofs that he was devotedly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of congenital development in relation to the respective condition of virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician's mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has grown from the basis of the science. The problem is suggested: Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a sieve on woman, or have these affections almost ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... English mathematician of this century, was publicly denounced in church by Dean Cockburn, of York; and when George Eliot died a few weeks since, her lifeless remains were refused interment in Westminster Abbey, where so many inferior ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools. I mean to say, that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various |
