"Calculator" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was certainly impracticable; but Whiston and Ditton might have retorted that they were nearer to the longitude than their satirist to the kingdom of heaven, or even to a bishopric. Arbuthnot, I think, here and elsewhere, reveals himself as the calculator who kept Swift right in his proportions in the matter of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, etc. Swift was very ignorant about things connected with number. He writes to Stella that he has discovered that leap-year comes every four years, and that all his life he had thought it came every ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... how Billy was lost in astonishment at the Lightning Calculator,—wanted me to beg the secret of that prodigy for him to do his sums by,—finally thought he had discovered it, and resolved to keep his arm whirling all the time he studied his arithmetic lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... invested livres. In fine, this priest, vicious but politic, sceptical yet learned, treacherous yet amiable, weak in appearance yet as vigorous physically as intellectually, was so genuinely useful to his pupil, so complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds of strength, so profound when it was needful to make some human reckoning, so youthful at table, at Frascati, at—I know not where, that the grateful Henri de Marsay was hardly moved at aught in 1814, except when he looked at the portrait of his beloved ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.—But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... more serious matters, or the last resort of a feeble intellect, it was the all-engrossing theme. The man with the latest hare-brained theory of the causation of the wind was accorded a full hearing. The lightning calculator who estimated the annual tonnage of drift-snow sweeping off Adelie Land was received as a futurist and thinker. Discussion was always free, and the subject was never thrashed out. Evidence on the great topic accumulated day by day and month by month; yet there was no one without an innate hope ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
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