"Parabola" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... published, in 1849, a method of calculating logarithms.[329] First, a long list of instances in which, as he alleges, foreign discoverers have been pillaged by Englishmen, or turned into Englishmen: for example, O'Neill,[330] so called by Mr. Byrne, the rectifier of the semi-cubical parabola claimed by the Saxons under the name of Neal: the grandfather of this mathematician was conspicuous enough as Neal; he was archbishop of York. This list, says the writer, might be continued without ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly kindliness. The aim was too ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the great flash, illuminating all the landscape, the white cloud rolling upward and outward, unfolding, expanding, spreading over the wide river, and the bright spark rising high in the air, turning with the revolving shell, reaching its altitude and sailing straight along the arch of the parabola, then descending with increasing rapidity, ending in a bright flash, and an explosion which echoes and re-echoes far away. The next day I went with Captain Maynadier across the point to reconnoitre the batteries on the island and watch the explosions of the shells. We passed a deserted farm-house, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... King a shove along the path in the general direction of the mullah. Then he seized the dead body by the legs, and hurled it like a sling shot, watching it with a grin as it fell in a wide parabola. After that he took the dead man's rifle, and those of the three other dead men, that he had hidden in a crevice in the rock, and loaded them all on a woman in addition to King's saddle that ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... breakfast time, the first shell burst near the camp—a short rapid squeal followed by a sharp report. The second shell burst a few minutes after, throwing up earth and smoke. A steel fragment came sailing over in a wide parabola and struck the foot of a man standing in the breakfast queue. He limped to the first-aid hut, looking very pale. When he got there, he had some difficulty in finding his wound, it was ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... my lord," said Cosmo, taking the first word that apology might be immediate, "I could make no one hear me, and therefore took the liberty of describing a parabola over ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... (suggested by my old telescope), Barlow's theory of numbers, and division of the circle into 17 parts, partial differentials, theory of eye-pieces, epicycloids, Figure of the Earth, Time of body in arc of parabola, Problem of Sound, Tides, Refraction of Lens, including thickness, &c., Ivory's paper on Equations, Achromatism of microscope, Capillary Attraction, Motions of Fluids, Euler's principal axes, Spherical pendulum, Equation b squared(d squaredy/dx squared)(d squaredy/dt squared), ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... her heart in her throat, saw a ball of yellow fire mount from the house. It swung into the air in a slow, lazy parabola, came down and dropped into the lake. But it fell where the marksman saw the boat, a safe distance to one side. A ball of fire dropping into the water, exploding the water all around it for a distance of a dozen feet. Like a cascade, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... yards, so she confines her attentions to front-line trenches. Her modus operandi is to discharge a large cylindrical bomb into the air. The bomb, which is about fifteen inches long and some eight inches in diameter, describes a leisurely parabola, performing grotesque somersaults on the way, and finally falls with a soft thud into the trench, or against the parapet. There, after an interval of ten seconds, Minnie's offspring explodes; and as she contains about thirty pounds ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... and bisecting D O. If on the other hand the diameter of the given circle be infinite, the circumference, as in Fig. 6, becomes a right line perpendicular to the axis at F, and the curve satisfies the familiar definition of the parabola, D E being equal to E H, D P equal to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... moisture out of his eyes and stared at the mosquito, which was growing bigger every minute. With the velocity of a projectile, this monstrous insect, or whatever it was, came sweeping up behind them from the Height of Land, soaring into the zenith in a great parabola, until with a shiver of excitement Bennie recognized that it was ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... he was almost certain to tumble backwards into the aisle, "taking a regular toss," as hunting-men would say, and to our unspeakable delight we would see a pair of slim legs in overalls and a pair of spurred heels describing a graceful parabola as they followed their youthful owner into the aisle. This particular form of religious relaxation appealed to me enormously, and I looked forward to it ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... foregoing characteristics, the form being elongated and the parietal walls so far overhanging as to conceal the zygomatic arches in the vertical view, so that if lines be drawn as previously mentioned, instead of forming a triangle they may, like the asymptotes of a parabola, be extended to infinity ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... orbit, and its debris passed off again in a hyperbola. That a concussion would not add to its velocity is certain, and the departure in a hyperbolic orbit would be contrary to the law of gravitation. This principle is thus stated by Newton:—"In parabola velocitas ubiquo equalis est velocitati corporis revolventis in circulo ad dimidiam distantiam; in ellipsi minor est in hyperbola major." (Vid. Prin. Lib. 1. Prop. ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... thin piece of wood, having the shape of a parabola, about eighteen inches or two feet long from point to point, the curve being on the thin side. Of the broad sides of the missile one is slightly convex, the other is flat. The thin sides are worked down finely to blunt ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... feature in the structure is the cupola; and that is the one thing which Michelangelo bequeathed to the intelligence of his successors. The curve which it describes finds no phrase of language to express its grace. It is neither ellipse nor parabola nor section of the circle, but an inspiration of creative fancy. It outsoars in vital force, in elegance of form, the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of Brunelleschi, upon which it was actually modelled. As a French ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... involuntarily, for we could see the dark spread of the vans plunging frantically in the air. I remember I stretched out my arms in an impotent gesture of aid, for with the speed of a bird of prey the dark mass lurched in a flat swaying parabola towards the earth, spinning the while upon itself, and striking the deep bed of snow, burst into ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... to hold the bottle of soda-water on a level with the candles that shed light over the festive board from a large silver branch, and the moment he made the incision, bang went the bottle of soda, knocking out two of the lights with the projected cork, which, performing its parabola the length of the room, struck the squire himself in the eye at the foot of the table: while the hostess at the head had a cold bath down her back. Andy, when he saw the soda-water jumping out of ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... laughed loud and long: finally he goaded a patriarch bull, who turned instantly on the sword, sent his long horns clean through the spark, and with a furious jerk of his prodigious neck sent him flying over his head into the air. He described a bold parabola and fell sitting, and unconsciously waving his glittering blade, into the yellow Tiber. The laughing ladies screamed and wrung their hands, all but Gerard's fair. She uttered something very like ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... certain beautiful curve known to geometricians by the name of the parabola. Its form is shown in the adjoining figure; it is a curved line which bends in towards and around a certain point known as the focus. This would not be the occasion for any allusion to the geometrical properties ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... it struck the ground just three feet away from where he stood. There was a shout of acclamation from the whole field, which became a roar of unbounded enthusiasm when he sent the ball flying in a parabola, not six feet from the ground, and right to the hurdles that marked the opposite goal. The Kilronan men were wild about their young curate, and under his eye they beat their opponents hollow; and one admirer, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... mathematics at St Andrews and later at Edinburgh, and invented the first successful reflecting telescope. The distinctive feature of his Vera quadratura is his use of an infinite converging series, a plan that Archimedes used with the parabola. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. A person who complains of the men of 1688 for not having been men of 1835 might just as well complain of a projectile for describing a parabola, or of quicksilver for being ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... true, and it has good authority for this 'variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold. He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words—hunched back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe hiding-place under ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes |
