"Mathematics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier, accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races, and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eddication the gal gets at a school like that isn't worth a row of pins, and when they go away they don't know nothin' useful, nor even anything tip-top ornamental. All they've learned is the pianer and higher mathematics. As for anythin' useful, they're nowhere. There isn't one of them could bound New Jersey or tell you when Washington crossed the Delaware.'—'That may be, sir,' says I, 'but them higher branches comes useful. If Washington really did cross the Delaware, your little gal could ask somebody ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... so to speak, it administered the reasoning faculty in him a son grbut he was unaware of it, that power d'autant plus fourbe qu'elle ne l'est pas toujours. Hidden under the apparent rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, [89] precocious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work and his way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge. He might have discovered the mathematical ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the tutor, you know—said she could read all the history and literature she wanted, and it was a waste of time to study geography until the war was over and the map settled. Moreover, she told Mr. Timmins to his face that she knew more about practical mathematics and executive finance than he did, and the dead languages could stay dead as far as ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... had been a precocious scholar at Dr. Park's school; good in mathematics and in languages. Her father, whom she had recently lost had been proud of her, and petted her. She had drawn at Cambridge, numbers of lively young men about her. She had had a circle of young women who were devoted to her, and who described her as "a wonder ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... well," said the big young man, whose name appeared to be Burrows. "Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood here," indicating the little man in the blazer, "doesn't know one note of music from another. Still, he knows something. He knows enough to take ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... stinging sarcasm, which he would break through as he would burst through so many brambles on those hunting excursions in which he and Harry Warrington rode so constantly together; whilst George, retreating to his tents, read mathematics, and French, and Latin, and sulked in his book-room more and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... psychic characters he says that he has no specially prominent talent, but is much interested in languages, mathematics, physics and philosophy, in fact, in abstract subjects generally. "While I take a lively interest in every kind of intellectual work," he says, "it is only recently that I have been attracted to real life and its requirements. I have never had much skill in physical ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... some months in a boarding-house near Geneva she became an inmate of the family of M. d'Albert Durade, a Swiss water-color painter of some reputation, who afterwards became the translator of her works into French. She devoted the winter of 1849-50 to the study of French and its literature, to mathematics and to reading. Her teacher in mathematics soon told her that she was able to proceed without his aid. She read Rousseau and studied the French socialists. M. Durade painted her portrait, making a remarkable picture. The softness of the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... successors armed and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude valor of the Barbarian mercenaries. The military art has been changed by the invention of gunpowder; which enables man to command the two most powerful agents of nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry, mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the service of war; and the adverse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of attack and of defence. Historians may indignantly observe, that ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... suggested suavely. "Your highly trained mind observed, correlated, and memorized the most intricate data and mathematics, meanwhile guiding your social relations with your former colleagues so as to remain unsuspected while stealing their most cherished secret. Such a feat demonstrates ...
— Irresistible Weapon • Horace Brown Fyfe
... the failure to figure that gave me my first idea of the importance of nut culture. Some 50 years ago a small boy on a New England farm could not, or would not, do his sums in the old Coburn Arithmetic. It made no difference that the teacher called it Mathematics, and pointed it with the end of a hickory stick. By any other name it was ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... [1208] Of Mathematics Goldsmith wrote:—'This seems a science to which the meanest intellects are equal.' See post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head! Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our "muddy vesture ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... first place I have compounded a blend of modern poetry and mathematics, which retains all the romance of the latter and loses none of the dry accuracy of the former. Here is ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... that On Thursday Evening June 21st, 1781, and for two more Evenings successively, The following curious Collection of valuable and scarce BOOKS, containing History, Biography, Voyages, Travels, Philosophy, Mathematics, Periodical Papers, Letters, Essays, Arts, Sciences, Novels and Adventures, with Poetic and Dramatic Entertainment, by the most celebrated ancient and modern Authors, who have explored, investigated, and attempted to illuminate the human ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... this the highest intensity and capacity. They are in some sort rebels battling against time, not the humble well-doer content simply to live and bless God. Between them and living men there is the difference which exists between analytical and geometrical mathematics: the former has to do with signs, the latter with realities. The former contains the laws of the physical world, but a man may know and use them like an adept, and yet be ignorant of physics. He may know all there is of algebra, without seeing that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the daughter of Prince Edward, and granddaughter of John the Third. She was young and beautiful; she could talk both Latin and Greek, besides being well versed in philosophy, mathematics and theology. She had the scriptures at her tongue's end, both the old dispensation and the new, and could quote from the fathers with the promptness of a bishop. She was so strictly orthodox that, on being compelled ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was so well seen in mathematics, that he could tell you, throughout Spain, every part, every port, every ship, with its burden; whither bound, what preparations, what impediments for diversion of enterprises, counsel, and resolution; and, that we may see, as in a little map, how docible ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... of one of these ragged clients is to our point. "Among those," he wrote to Madame Voland,[48] "whom chance and misery sent to my address was one Glenat, who knew mathematics, wrote a good hand, and was in want of bread. I did all I could to extricate him from his embarrassments. I went begging for customers for him on every side. If he came at meal-times, I would not let him go; if he lacked shoes, I gave him them; now ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... at all,"—said Santoris—"but perfectly natural. When will you realise that there is no such thing as 'coincidence' but only a very exact system of mathematics?" ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... or by lecture could diffuse themselves throughout a literary nation, it will baffle the algebraist of metaphysics to calculate the unknown quantities of the propagation of human thought. There are problems in metaphysics, as well as in mathematics, which can never ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... suit one another mainly. He Jives on the ground floor, for convenience of the gout; I prefer the attic story, for the air. He keeps three footmen and two maids; I have neither maid nor laundress, not caring to be troubled with them! His forte, I understand, is the higher mathematics; my turn, I confess, is more to poetry and the belles lettres. The very antithesis of our characters would make up a harmony. You must bring the Baron ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... is Nicholas Saunderson, a blind man with a talent for mathematics, who between 1711 and 1739 was a professor at the University of Cambridge. Diderot quotes at some length the atheistic opinions of Saunderson, giving as his authority the Life of the latter by "Dr. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... speculation led to demonstration, and how inquiries into the world of matter prepared the way for the solution of intellectual phenomena. Philosophy kept pace with geometry, and those who observed Nature also gloried in abstruse calculations. Philosophy and mathematics seem to have been allied with the worship of art among the same men, and it is difficult to say which more distinguished them,—aesthetic culture ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... apparent than real—an ideal rather than a practice. Thus we have one or two modern authors who have installed themselves in sociology by the royal road of romance—though even to this branch of learning, as to mathematics, there is no short cut whatsoever, even for those whose pens are naturally skilful—authors who tell us that, given this numerical preponderance of women, some kind of polygamous modification of the present marriage system should certainly ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... portrait-painter or dramatist, always reveals himself in his manner, are ideas that can hardly be said to occur to him; but Mr. Quilter really does his best and bravely faces every difficulty in modern art, with the exception of Mr. Whistler. Painting, he tells us, is 'of a different quality to mathematics,' and finish in art is 'adding more fact'! Portrait painting is a bad pursuit for an emotional artist as it destroys his personality and his sympathy; however, even for the emotional artist there is hope, as a portrait can be converted into a picture 'by adding to the likeness of the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... between reason and instinct. Instinct in many points in wonderful, especially among insects, but where it is wonderful, it is a blind obedience, and inherited from generation to generation. We observe, as in the case of the bees, that they obey the truest laws of mathematics, and from these laws they never have deviated from their creation, and that all animals, as far as their self-defence or their sustenance is concerned, show a wonderful blind obedience to an unerring power, and a sagacity almost superior to reason. But wonderful as this is, it ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... I learned a great deal of geography and arithmetic. There's no history taught at all though, nor grammar. But you'll wonder how good the master was at mathematics, and he nothing to look at at all. His name was Shee," went on the Doctor, now quite over his shyness; "and he was terrible fond of roast potatoes. I remember he used to put them in the grate to roast and take them out with two sticks, for in those days ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... part of the treatise, commonly called 'De Artibus ac Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum,' contains so much as the author thought that every monk should be acquainted with concerning the four liberal arts—Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Mathematics—the last of which is divided into the four 'disciplines' of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. As illustrating the relative importance of these sciences (as we call them) as apprehended by Cassiodorus, it is curious to observe ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... morning of actual school work went well enough; Irving met his classes, which were altogether in mathematics, assigned them lessons, and managed to keep them and himself busy. From one of them he brought away some algebra exercises, which he spent part of the afternoon in correcting. When he had finished this work, the invitation to witness the water duel ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology, or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... distinguished, certainly among the first institutions in the country; but, in my opinion, formed in the entry of the first Harvard house I entered, Harvard has not begun to hit the nail on the head. Education! Do you call it education, to put a boy into a hole, and work out of him a certain amount of mathematics, and work into him a certain number of languages? Is a man dressed, because one arm has a spotless wristband, unquestionable sleeve-buttons, a handsome sleeve, and a well-fitting glove at the end, while ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... founded the Cutler School in New York. I could not go to school because I knew so much less than most boys of my age in some subjects and so much more in others. In science and history and geography and in unexpected parts of German and French I was strong, but lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics. My grandfather had made his summer home in Oyster Bay a number of years before, and my father now made Oyster Bay the summer home of his family also. Along with my college preparatory studies I carried on the work of a practical student ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... talk! One would think you had never been schooled in mathematics. Why, three is a magic figure. You can do plenty of amazing things with it. Don't you know that three is ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... to amuse himself during the day,—for his time was his own from dawn to dark,—in trying to work out the law of averages, following out the hints he gathered from the working of the wheel. He had always had a taste for mathematics, having rather "gone in" for that branch at college. Fleeting visions of becoming an astronomer had visited him from time to time; but the paralysis of wealth had deterred him while he was yet ostensible master of his own fate, and now the ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... his door, "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here." The greatest value of the study of the classics and mathematics comes from the habits of accurate and concise thought which it induces. The habit-forming portion of life is the dangerous period, and we need the discipline of close application to hold ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the sake of some benefit, is to be tolerated. Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... further proved by the interrogation of one of Meno's slaves, who, in the skilful hands of Socrates, is made to acknowledge some elementary relations of geometrical figures. The theorem that the square of the diagonal is double the square of the side—that famous discovery of primitive mathematics, in honour of which the legendary Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed a hecatomb—is elicited from him. The first step in the process of teaching has made him conscious of his own ignorance. He has had the 'torpedo's shock' given him, and is the better for the operation. ...
— Meno • Plato
... 8th of December last, M. Gerbois, professor of mathematics at Versailles College, rummaging among the stores at a second-hand dealer's, discovered a small mahogany writing-desk, which took his fancy because of its ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic, is appalled when he is commanded to write what is termed "a composition." When he enters college the same fear follows him and the Professor of Rhetoric is a more terrible personage to his imagination than the Professors of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. Both boys at school and young men in college show no lack of power in speaking their native language with a vehemence and fluency which almost stuns the ears of their seniors. Why, then, should they find such difficulty in writing it? When ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Caen, where his father's town-house stood, and the College du Mont, where the Jesuits gave him his education. A letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said, too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. "If you only knew," the reminiscent father of a family exclaims in this letter, "in what shabby lodging, in what a dark and chilly closet, I was mewed up at your age; with what severity I was treated; how I was fed and dressed!" ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant anecdotes, and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember. For nearly fifty years she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Swendons with such freedom the night before. Mr. Neckart had known the captain years ago. When he was a boy, too poor to pay for schooling, he used to go to the captain at night for help in his Greek or mathematics. Swendon had always preferred the companionship of younger men than himself, and was never without a "following" of clever, unruly schoolboys, whom he was as ready to help when they were lazy, as to tip with silver half-dollars—when he had them. Some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... associations of which they had none. In his instinctive reach after life, he assimilated all food that came in his way. His growing life was his sole impulsive after knowledge. And already he saw a glimmer here and there in regions of mathematics from which had never fallen a ray into the corner of an eye of those grinding men. That was because he read books of poetry and philosophy of which they had never heard. For the rest, he passed his examinations creditably, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... is after our experiences.... We will teach. Woodcraft, weathercraft, husbandry, beast-craft, sky-craft. I can do that much for them. Lit., hum., Greek, Latin, English, Dante. History, shadowy; geography, practical. Tinkering, carpentering, planting. No mathematics; I can't ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... as it might seem to the general reader at first sight. As applied to physiological problems it should have the same determinate value, in expressing functional differences, as in the higher operations of mathematics. Nothing can, of course, differentiate itself, nor can any two things differentiate each other, even when functionally allied. The actual coA"fficient sought is the difference effected, in functional value, in one of two independent variables. For all ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of faith; he also supplied material for that classification of the various sciences which is an essential accompaniment of every philosophical movement, and of which the Middle Ages felt the value.[5] The uniform distribution into natural sciences, mathematics and theology which he recommends may be traced in the work of various teachers up to the thirteenth century, when it is finally accepted and defended by St. Thomas in his commentary on ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... the two forces were seven miles apart and the battle was on. It is necessary here to give certain facts about gunnery on a large modern battleship. Firing at a range of seven miles means a test of mathematics rather than of the mere matter of pointing guns. At that distance the target—the ship to be hit—is barely visible on the sky line on the clearest and calmest sea. If a hole the size of the head of a pin be made in a piece of cardboard and the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... to the membership of which the King had done me the honour of calling, me. Several of that body who are still alive will remember having been present when I read it, and above the rest those amongst them who applied themselves particularly to the study of Mathematics; of whom I cannot cite more than the celebrated gentlemen Cassini, Roemer, and De la Hire. And, although I have since corrected and changed some parts, the copies which I had made of it at that time may serve for proof that I have yet added nothing to it save some conjectures touching ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... duty. The officers should be given the chance to perfect themselves by study in the higher branches of this art. At West Point the education should be of the kind most apt to turn out men who are good in actual field service; too much stress should not be laid on mathematics, nor should proficiency therein be held to establish the right of entry to a corps d'elite. The typical American officer of the best kind need not be a good mathematician; but he must be able to master himself, to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... these MSS. to my publisher, to get his opinion as to whether they are worth printing just now. Not that I wish you to build much on the chance. It is not necessary that you should be a poet. I should prefer mathematics for you, as a methodic discipline of the intellect. Most active minds write poetry, at a certain age—I wrote a good deal, I recollect, myself. But that is no reason for publishing. This haste to rush into print is one of the bad signs of the times—a symptom of the unhealthy activity which ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the English public school and university; I could not speak and read and think French and German as she could for all that I had a pedantic knowledge of the older forms of those tongues; and the classics and mathematics upon which I had spent the substance of my years were indeed of little use to me, have never been of any real use to me, they were ladders too clumsy to carry about and too short to reach anything. My general ideas came from the newspapers and the reviews. She on the other hand had read ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... independence of will that marked her ancestry. She set herself to acquire knowledge, and she did. When she was twenty she spoke three languages and could read in four. She knew history, astronomy, physical science, and it crowded her teacher in mathematics very hard to keep one lesson in advance of her. Besides, she could sew and cook and "keep house." Yet it was all gathered by labor and toil and lift. By taking thought she had added cubits ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... executive power, and certain traits which he then displayed deserve brief notice. Although a "conservative" in his advocacy of the maintenance of the old-time curriculum, based upon the ancient languages and mathematics, and in his opposition to the free elective system, he proved an inflexible reformer as regards methods of instruction, the efficiency of which he was determined to establish. He showed a ruthless resolution to eliminate ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... at Nordhausen two years and six months, till Easter, 1825. During this time I studied with considerable diligence the Latin classics, French, history, my own language, &c.; but did little in Hebrew, Greek, and the Mathematics. I lived in the house of the director, and got, through my conduct, highly into his favour, so much so, that I was held up by him in the first class as an example to the rest, and he used to take me regularly with him in his walks, to converse with me in Latin. ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... exchange it for the best beaver in Britain. I was, during several years, a kind of factotum servant to a country clergyman, where I pickt up a good many scraps of learning, particularly in some branches of the mathematics. Whenever I feel inclined to rest myself on my way, I take my seat under a hedge, laying my poetic wallet on the one side, and my fiddle-case on the other, and placing my hat between my legs, I can, by means of its brim, or rather brims, go through the whole doctrine ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of beggars. And yet, like pleasant fellows, with all this vileness, ignorance, rudeness, and impudence, they represent to us, for so they call it, the lives of the apostles. Yet what is more pleasant than that they do all things by rule and, as it were, a kind of mathematics, the least swerving from which were a crime beyond forgiveness—as how many knots their shoes must be tied with, of what color everything is, what distinction of habits, of what stuff made, how many straws broad their girdles and of what ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... movement by which the figure is described. No doubt, for greater strictness, all considerations of motion may be eliminated from mathematical processes; but the introduction of motion into the genesis of figures is nevertheless the origin of modern mathematics. We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns has proved to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly superficial displacements ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the foreign boys who knew little English were carefully grounded in mathematics and certain physical sciences. Their proficiency made it a difficult task for their immature teacher. She was aware of her limitations and struggled faithfully to overcome them, spending many hours to qualify herself in ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... is so with what is called genius. I once knew a learned minister, a leading professor in one of the colleges, who was absolutely devoid of any other phase of education, except theology. He could not master the first rudiments of mathematics, and knew no more of astronomy than a ten year old boy, but he was supreme in his ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... The general opinion of the wiser sort goes against heavy stakes, and "wild play" is only talked about with contempt. The qualities held in honour, so far as we can gather from the conversation, are "judgment," which means a careful study of the little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, and "constancy"—the playing not from caprice but on a definite plan and principle. Nobody has the least belief in "luck." A winner is congratulated on his "science." The loser explains the causes of his loss. A portly person who announces ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... was instant and irrevocable. Architecture became in France a mere web of waving lines,—in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry for passion; tho Gothic art became a mere expression of wanton expenditure, and vulgar mathematics; and was swept away, as it then deserved to be swept away, by the severer pride, and purer learning, of the schools founded on ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... Sciences (a ferocious attack on most of the professions), and On Occult Philosophy (treating of natural, celestial, and religious magic). The "magician," he says, "must study three sciences—physics, mathematics, and theology." Agrippa's ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... hunting for game animals, and teaching at the school. Almost all Searchers teach when they can be persuaded to stay in town for a spell. Since there are no more colleges to produce teachers, anyone who knows something useful takes a turn at teaching. 'Fore the war, I was a mathematics major in college, so twice a week I teach all kinds of math at school, from numbers through calculus. Mostly, Searchers teach about what the places they ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... audacity to set myself up as a legislator on marriage, I was going to take lunch at the house of a college friend, who was perhaps too early in life afflicted with a wife and two children. My former professor of mathematics lived at a short distance from the house of my college friend, and I promised myself the pleasure of a visit to this worthy mathematician before indulging my appetite for the dainties of friendship. I accordingly ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... and forthwith neglected the child entirely—a course of conduct which was not so culpable as might be supposed, since (with the sole exception of Mrs. Runacles) he had never been known to err in choosing a subordinate. In times of peace he gave himself up to studying the mathematics, in which he was a proficient, and to the designing of such curious toys as sundials, water-clocks, pumps, and the like; which he so multiplied about the premises, out of pure joy in constructing them, that Simeon, his body-servant, had much ado to live among the many ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Venice and Rome, he came to Florence, learned to know Pico, and received from him a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics made by Cardinal Bessarion. Returning to Paris he taught, at the College of Cardinal Lemoine, mathematics, music and philosophy. He did not share the dislike of Aristotle manifested by most of the humanists, for he shrewdly suspected that what was offensive in the Stagyrite was due more to his scholastic translators and commentators than to himself. He therefore ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of the heavens and founded the art of medicine. The men of the Renascence, who were burnt and imprisoned for doubting the verbal inspiration of Aristotle and the Bible, were in fact going back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries built ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the educational system was a good one. In my days there was little taught besides classics and mathematics and divinity. There was a little French and science and history; but the core of the whole thing was undiluted classics. We did a good deal of composition, Greek and Latin, and the Latin verses were exercises out of which I got much real enjoyment, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... examination subjects are given out, I shall begin. My first performance will be my verses and my declamation. I shall then translate the Greek and Latin. The first time of going over I shall mark the passages which puzzle me, and then return to them again. But I shall have also to rub up my Mathematics, (by the bye, I begin the second book of Euclid to-day,) and to study whatever History may be appointed for the examination. I shall not be able to avoid trembling, whether I know my subjects or not. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... offend me so that I'll never, never forgive him, he is to bring his slate and pencil over here after supper this evening. And you'll come, too, with your geography. Yours truly, Susan Lanham, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Science in the Greenbank Independent and ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... more clearly to exhibit the grounds of this proposition, I shall refer in some slight detail to the course of study in English and in Mathematics. ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... Maunsell in 1595, concerned, we are told, 'the sciences mathematicall, as arithmetick, geometrie, astronomie, astrologie, musick, the arte of warre, and navigation.' But it is not my intention to include musick and the arte of warre here, this heading comprising those works which deal with mathematics and physics only, with their dependent subjects, such as (in addition to those mentioned by Master Maunsell) geodesy, mensuration of all kinds, meteorology, seismography, and books on chance ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... theology that it would not admit of any contradiction. When afterwards I learned that the mathematicians were so sure of their ground that every one must acknowledge it to be true, I was anxious to study mathematics, for the sake of the method, in order to give diligence to reduce theology to incontrovertible certainty." These words explain Wolff's whole system. He would make doctrine so plain by mathematical demonstration that it must ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of Burns's school-days is completed by the mention of a sojourn, probably in the summer of 1775, in his mother's parish of Kirkoswald. Hither he went to study mathematics and surveying under a teacher of local note, and, in spite of the convivial attractions of a smuggling village, seems to have made progress in his geometry till his head was turned by a girl who lived next ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... him battle, and after fighting for several minutes came out of the fray with his collar so rumpled, his best cap so crushed, and his face so smirched that it was a dearly-bought victory. But he was an excellent boy and an apt pupil, for I used to give him easy lessons in French and mathematics sometimes, so that when I left he was able to attend an advanced class at an evening college in the city. He had the sentiment of a gentleman too, though he was a printer's boy and was always called Bob. He never talked to me unless I spoke to him first or he had to give me some direction ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... your time in giving little lessons when you have great ones to give; in teaching the multiplication table the morning after you made at midnight a grand discovery upon the very summits of the moonlit mountain range of the mathematics; in enforcing the old law, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself when you know in your own heart that not a soul can ever learn to keep it without first learning to fulfil an infinitely greater one—to love his neighbour even as Christ hath loved him —then indeed one may ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... progress of technical knowledge the less is the advance made in the knowledge of men, which is perhaps the most pressing need of the new age, this statesman proposes to create a new type of university, where there would be two principal sections, one for the study of natural sciences and mathematics, and the other for the study of men, which would include biology, psychology, ethnography, sociology, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of the "gawkiest" students. He was tall, growing fast, raw-boned, with prominent chin and cheek bones, big hands and feet, sandy-haired and freckled. His mind broadened and expanded fast under the tutelage of Dr. William Small, a Scotchman and the professor of mathematics, who made young Jefferson his companion in his walks, and showed an interest in the talented youth, which the latter gratefully ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... his patron the emperor. The prime movers in the great scheme were the king's confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Bude, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about L80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king's vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Fancy the daring of a young girl to joke with a man twice her age in this way! I did not undeceive her, and allowed her to enlighten me on various subjects of contemporaneous interest. "It's so strange that the Chinese never study mathematics," she next remarked. "Why, all our public schools demand higher mathematics, and in the fourth grade you could not find a child ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... younger, was born on the 28th of May, 1759, and was the second son of Lord Chatham. He was educated at Cambridge university, where he continued nearly seven years, devoting his attention mainly to three things; namely, the classics, mathematics and the logic of Aristotle applied to the purposes of debate. In early life his whole soul seems to have been absorbed by one idea—that of becoming a distinguished orator. "Multum haud multa," was his motto in most of his ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... who was well known in England thirty years ago as a most amiable and cultivated gentleman and an excellent mathematician. He was then a student at Cambridge; and he died, years ago, in command of the army in Syria. Hussein Effendi was instructed in mathematics by Ingliz Selim Effendi, who translated a work {16} of Bonnycastle[37] into Turkish.[38] This Englishman was Richard Baily, brother of Francis Baily[39] the astronomer, who emigrated to Turkey in his youth, and adopted the manners of the Turks, but whether their religion also I never ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... directions—a grand collegiate literary race. Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt. About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters to swell ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... probability, and that I believed in Catholicism on a probability, and that all three were about the same kind of probability, a cumulative, a transcendent probability, but still probability; inasmuch as He who made us, has so willed that in mathematics indeed we arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration, but in religious inquiry we arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities—inasmuch as He who has willed that we should so act, co-operates with us in our acting, and thereby bestows ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... by his advice. They devoted themselves ardently to study, and gave up almost the whole of their time to it; they enabled themselves to write French correctly, and acquired a good knowledge of history. Italian, English, the higher branches of mathematics, turning and dialing, filled up in succession their leisure moments. Madame Adelaide, in particular, had a most insatiable desire to learn; she was taught to play upon all instruments, from the horn (will it ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... presented a solid amount of Chinese and English, with some Latin and perhaps one other modern language. That may seem a great deal to ask at present, but our higher schools of learning ought soon to be able to supply such a demand, as well as the necessary training in mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. In other words the student must be equipped in the very ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... naturally chooses such knaves and fools to teach them. Now the Bible, which contains the precepts of the priests' religion, is the most difficult book in the world to be understood; it requires a thorough knowledge in natural, civil, ecclesiastical history, law, husbandry, sailing, physic, pharmacy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and everything else that can be named: And everybody who believes it ought to understand it, and must do so by force of his own freethinking, without any ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... A GOOD POSITION by studying Architecture, Engineering, Electricity, Drafting, Mathematics, Shorthand, Typewriting, English, Penmanship, Bookkeeping, Business, Telegraphy, Plumbing. Best teachers. Thorough individual instruction. Rates lower than any other school. Instruction also by mail in any desired study. Steam engineering a specialty. Call or ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... such purposes, that the discipline of the Mathematics is so important an element in female education; and it is in this aspect, that the mere acquisition of facts, and the attainment of accomplishments, should be made of altogether ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... "Mathematics, which has succeeded to erudition, begins to be unfashionable; we know at present indeed that one may be as great a dizzard in resolving a problem as in restoring a reading. Everything is compatible with genius, but nothing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... arithmetical (Volume I, page 41). We may, however, disregard the arithmetic in Journeys, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the method of reading discussed under the title Close Reading is exactly the method of study that every person must pursue if he is to make any success in mathematics. In no other branch is there a call for such close reading, and only he who can get all the meaning out of the statement of a problem can be certain of his solution. One of the reasons that so many children ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... will, she told me that I had received the education of a servant. The next day she placed me as a boarder in a great abbey near Paris, where I have masters of all kinds, who teach me, among other things, history, geography, grammar, mathematics and riding. But I have so little capacity for all those sciences, that I make but ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... ass. What do medals for mathematics matter here? You are bigger than I am, and heaps better to look at. In fact, my dear Bob, I might even say of you that you were the least little bit showy." Gerrard was falling back insensibly into the old chaffing tone, but a look on his friend's ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... the analysis of the process of reasoning, is a cultural study rather than a practical one, save in criticism both of one's own work and another's. More cultural, and at the same time more practical, is the study of exact reasoning in the form of some branch of mathematics. Abraham Lincoln, when he "rode the circuit" as a lawyer, carried with him a geometry, which he studied at every opportunity. To the mental training which it gave him was due his success not only as a lawyer, but also as a political orator. Every one of his speeches was as complete a demonstration ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... a path of slow formation. It was a path that was never destined to become a road. It is only in mathematics that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. The grade through the Jacobus woods was so steep that no wagon could have been hauled up it over the mud roads of that day and generation. Lumber, groceries, ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... the assault of the future; incessantly at war with necessity, their invention always marching with lighted match blows up the obstacle almost before it incommodes them. Their daily existence is a work of genius, a daily problem which they always succeed in solving by the aid of audacious mathematics. They would have forced Harpagon to lend them money, and have found truffles on the raft of the "Medusa." At need, too, they know how to practice abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... artist draughtsman, his subjects being mainly ornithological and zoological. Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson) was an expert in mathematics and a lecturer on that science in Christ ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... you one who can take you twice a week or so in languages and history and mathematics. I daresay some broken-down sot of a student would take you on for sevenpence a lesson. You could ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... and the Egyptians. Not only had painting, sculpture, architecture, and the industrial arts reached a remarkable development; but in Chaldaea, at any rate, a vast amount of knowledge had been accumulated and methodized, in the departments of grammar, mathematics, astronomy, and natural history. Where such traces of the scientific spirit are visible, naturalistic speculation is rarely far off, though, so far as I know, no remains of an Accacian, or Egyptian, philosophy, properly so called, have ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... were spent at Cremona, whence in B.C. 55 he went to Mediolanum and then to Rome for his higher education. He studied philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and rhetoric; but his shyness prevented his being a success at the bar, where, we are told, he appeared ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... replied. "I may have to ask your help in working out the mathematics, too. Anyway...." He stopped ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... The whole thing has been very scientifically calculated, of course; but the slightest flaw in the mathematics could cause a miss. Yes, the projectile may never reach its mark; it's something ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... little Tamsen's life was rendered happier by this event; for in her step-mother she found a friend who tenderly directed her thoughts and encouraged her work. At fifteen years of age she finished the course of study, and her proficiency in mathematics, geometry, philosophy, etc., called forth the highest praise of her teachers and learned friends. She, like many daughters of New England, felt that talents are intrusted to be used, and that each ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... Nevada.—"I am an enthusiastic student of mathematics, and it is so vexatious to me to find my progress constantly impeded by these mysterious arithmetical technicalities. Now do tell me what the difference is between ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town there was nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six months since she left John Thompson's Ladies' College in John Square, so by this time the teachers would barely remember that she had been strong in Latin and mathematics but weak in French, and they were the only adult people who had ever heard her name. She wanted to be tremendously known as strong in everything by personalities more glittering than these. Less than that would ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... have traced his efforts to rise above the intellectual apathy and the indifference to culture which characterized the people among whom he was reared, by studying with eagerness every subject on which he could find books,—biography, state history, mathematics, grammar, surveying, and finally law. We have followed his growth in ambition and in popularity from the day when, on a keg in an Indiana grocery, he debated the contents of the Louisville "Journal" with a company of admiring elders, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... be supposed that a mastery of mathematics and a finished education are necessary to understand the results of astronomical research. It took at first the highest power of mind to make the discoveries that are now laid at the feet of the lowliest. It took sublime faith, courage, and the results of ages of experience in navigation, ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... always looked at the ground when he walked about, until I understood that they were roots of words, with a view to a new Dictionary which he had in contemplation. Adams, our head-boy, who had a turn for mathematics, had made a calculation, I was informed, of the time this Dictionary would take in completing, on the Doctor's plan, and at the Doctor's rate of going. He considered that it might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... investigation into the phenomena of Spiritism, might be of no small value. These men are: William Wundt, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Leipsic; Gustav Theodore Fechner, now Professor Emeritus of Physics in the University of Leipsic; W. Scheibner, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Leipsic; and Wilhelm Weber, Professor Emeritus of Physics in the University of Goettingen—all of them men of eminence in their ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... few who have the charge of youth should think of their deep responsibilities as he did. How many private tutors I have met with, who think they have done their duty when they have taught their pupils the sufficient knowledge of Latin and Greek, and mathematics to enable them to enter the universities, without a thought beyond—without pointing out to them, clearly and unmistakably, whatever may be their station in life, that they must have responsibilities, and that they ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... occupation, and made it necessary that he should trim his sail. Dr. Sloper's opposition was the unknown quantity in the problem he had to work out. The natural way to work it out was by marrying Catherine; but in mathematics there are many short cuts, and Morris was not without a hope that he should yet discover one. When Catherine took him at his word and consented to renounce the attempt to mollify her father, he drew back skilfully enough, as I have said, and kept the wedding-day ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... of a worn-out collection of rules giving way before the honest, individual approach of Cowper. "Many a fair precept in poetry," says Dryden apropos of Roscommon's rules for translation, "is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation."[461] Confronted by such discrepancies, the theorist has again and again had to modify his "specious" rules, with the result that the theory of translation, though a small, is ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... island is a portion of land entirely surrounded by water; as Cuba." "The names of cities should always commence with a capital letter; e.g., New York, Paris." "The boy was proficient in one branch; viz., Mathematics." "No man is perfect; i.e., ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin |
