"Algebraic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Captain-General, but his scribe avails himself of a lingering farewell at the door, to hint an immediate and pressing need for "a very small darkey!" Next day, the diminutive African does not appear; but, as it is believed that Spanish officials prefer gold even to mortal flesh, his algebraic equivalent is unquestionably furnished in the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... temperament; or is it because the studies of the modern languages and history, the endless practising of etudes and sonatas, the stooping wearily over some delicate embroidery, is less taxing to the nervous system than Latin and Greek, and the working out of algebraic problems? I am not prepared to say. But grant that a small part of the solution can be found in this difference, there are yet other and deeper causes at work. One of them is that the young German girl, while at school, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Thus represented in algebraic formulae, it is easy to see that repetition of the materials designated a, or a and b together, is the source of unity in the period, and the third element introduced, here designated as c, has its only use in serving as variety. ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... to present in the clearest light each subject discussed, and to give in matter and methods the best training in algebraic analysis ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Infinite and the finite, has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations, that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as a ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more persuasive rabbi exists. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum[13] of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... items ought in strictness also to be calculated. Then sum up all the pleasures which stand to the credit side of the account; add the pains which are the debit items, or liabilities, on the other; then take their algebraic sum, and the balance of it on the side of pleasure will be the good tendency of the act upon the whole." (Dewey ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the dining-hall which grew into a roar as the door closed. The boys, who had sat down to breakfast rather wanting in appetite—from the fact that their consciences were not very clear regarding studies in English and French or certain algebraic solutions or arrangements in angles specified by "A B C" and "D E F," according to the declarations of a well-known gentleman named Euclid—felt in their great relief as if they would like another cup of coffee and two slices more, for ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS System") was created, issued a part number, and circulated as photocopy folklore; it was called "How to Goad and Levitate your CHAOS System". 3. /n./ Algebraic Operating System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse Polish) notation. 4. A {BSD}-like operating system for the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... everything. Provided that good society knows the amount of your fortune, you are classed among those figures which equal yours, and no one asks to see your credentials, because everybody knows how little they cost. In a city where social problems are solved by algebraic equations, adventurers have many chances in their favor. Even if this family were of gypsy extraction, it was so wealthy, so attractive, that fashionable society could well afford to overlook its little mysteries. But, unfortunately, the enigmatical history of the Lanty family offered a perpetual ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... Theresa was considered a possible match for my grandfather in my youth. She and I are hardly contemporaries. And the other lady with the fascinating algebraic climax to her name,—she, too, is impossible; it seems that I can’t get the money by marrying her. I’d better let her take it. She’s as poor as the devil, ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... tenth may now represent a guinea, and next moment represent a thousand guineas. The exact amount of the duration expressed by an aeon depends altogether upon the particular subject which yields the aeon. It is, as I have said, a radix; and, like an algebraic square-root or cube-root, though governed by the most rigorous laws of limitation, it must vary in obedience to the nature of the particular subject whose ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... ores throughout the mine in all these particulars renders any method of calculation simply an approximation in the end. The factors which must remain unknown necessarily lead the engineer to the provision of a margin of safety, which makes mathematical refinement and algebraic formulae ridiculous. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... quantitative relations. The conception of quantity, therefore, if rigorously analyzed, will indicate a priori the natural and impassable boundaries of the science; while a subsequent examination of the quantities called infinite in the mathematical sense, and of the algebraic symbol of infinity, will be seen to verify the results of this a ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... plea: "I believe," he says, "that God is merciful; and I repose in his kindness, and trust he will have compassion on me." Alas, my friends! it was bad enough that Mr. Porter should have yesterday adopted the algebraic principle of neutralizing one text of scripture by another; but to carry up this principle to a contemplation of the character of God, and to bring it into collision with the attributes of Jehovah, and thus to set his mercy against his justice—his compassion against ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... again, though her face did not bear out the assertion, was beginning to talk of matters examinational once more. Notwithstanding protests, she brought forth from their hiding-place sundry arid little manuals and black-covered notebooks; her thoughts were divided between algebraic formulae and Nancy's relations with Lionel Tarrant. Perhaps because no secret was confided to her, she affected more appetite for the arid little books than she really felt. Nancy would neither speak of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... are computed by what may be called Long Measure. League is a vague term, and, like x in an algebraic equation, stands for an unknown quantity. It may mean ten miles, more or less,—any distance, in fact, over five miles. The unit of measure, as fixed by law, is estamos aqui, (here we are,) which is a mile and a half; hay no masita ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... subtract, multiply, divide, extract roots. algebraize[obs3]. check, prove, demonstrate, balance, audit, overhaul, take stock; affix numbers to, page. amount to, add up to, come to. Adj. numeral, numerical; arithmetical, analytic, algebraic, statistical, numerable, computable, calculable; commensurable, commensurate; incommensurable, incommensurate, innumerable, unfathomable, infinite. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... life in that of a man whom, but a few months before, had been only a matter of hearsay to her. Yet she had apparently taken him, as women will, for better, for worse, till death, as trustfully as if he and men generally were as knowable as A B C, instead of as unknown as the algebraic X. Only once had she faltered in her trust of him, and then but for a moment. How far had her love, and the sight of Peter's misery, led her blindly to renew that trust? And would it hold? She had seen how little people ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... the parabola once more, imagine it rolling on an indefinite straight line and ask what course does the focus of this curve follow. The answer comes: The focus of the parabola describes a 'catenary,' a line very simple in shape, but endowed with an algebraic symbol that has to resort to a kind of cabalistic number at variance with any sort of numeration, so much so that the unit refuses to express it, however much we subdivide the unit. It is called the number e. Its value ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... goggles painfully, Nagging his brain with all a grinder's might Till one sounds on the drowsy ear of night. Like Sibyl's leaves the papers strew his floor Wrought-out examples, 'wrinkles' by the score, Conundrums algebraic, 'tips' on Conics And thorny 'props' remembered by mnemonics. Betweenwhiles as the slow time lagging goes, He takes the spectacles from off his nose, Removes the damper from his aching head, Pours out the coffee, cuts a slice of bread, Sips wistfully the liquid ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... proper place to put a sofa. This logic is extremely simple, inasmuch as it consists in never expressing but one idea, that which contains the expression of their will. Like everything pertaining to female nature, this system may be resolved into two algebraic terms—Yes: no. There are also certain little movements of the head which mean so much that they may take the place ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... all this by his interpretation of the Book of Revelation; by labored calculations based upon arithmetical principles, and algebraic formulae until then unknown, but which appeared mystical and appalling from the fact that they were incomprehensible. The book was written in a style well calculated to perplex, astonish, or terrify the readers, especially those who were not well stocked with intelligence. It is therefore ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... encouraged the innovation, and all the company—but not without reluctance—adopted it. But it proved impossible to make them really understand the new games, which, on the departure of the Kergarouets, were voted head-splitters, algebraic problems, and intolerably difficult to play. All preferred their mouche, their dear, agreeable mouche. Mouche accordingly triumphed over modern games, as all ancient things have ever triumphed in Brittany ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilineal or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of mathematics are the calculations published by the weather-prophet of the Express. Arithmetic turns pale when she glances at them, and, striking her multiplication table with her algebraic knuckles, demands to know why the Express does not add a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... the essential forms which can affect the organism. This is a universal algebraic formula, by which we can solve all organic problems. We apply it to the hand, to the shoulder, to the eyes, to the voice—in a word, to all the agents of oratorical language. For example, it suffices to know the eccentro-eccentric form of the hand, of the eyes; and we reserve ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Vondervotteimittiss has existed, from its origin, in precisely the same condition which it at present preserves. Of the date of this origin, however, I grieve that I can only speak with that species of indefinite definiteness which mathematicians are, at times, forced to put up with in certain algebraic formulae. The date, I may thus say, in regard to the remoteness of its antiquity, cannot be less than any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... letters used to designate quantities, lines, etc., in algebraic, geometrical, and similar matter, and in explanation of diagrams ...
— The Uses of Italic - A Primer of Information Regarding the Origin and Uses of Italic Letters • Frederick W. Hamilton
... analyze things for himself and it had been something of a shock to discover that a college education was just a beginning—that beyond the campus of his alma mater spread a workaday world which scoffed at dead languages and went in for a living wage, which turned from isoceles triangles and algebraic conundrums to solve the essential problems of food and clothing and shingled roofs. It was a new viewpoint which planted doubts where what he had supposed to be certainties had been ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... anatomical lectures, and dabbled with some chemical experiments—which when Knighton and I repeated at his father's house, 9 Hanover Square, the baronet in future blew us up to the astonishment of the baronet in praesenti, his famous father. Also, I was a diligent student in the Algebraic class of Dr. Short, afterwards the good Bishop of St. Asaph; and I have before me now a memoria technica of mine in rhyme giving the nine chief rules of trigonometry, but not easily producible here as full of "sines and cosines, arcs, chords, tangents, and radii," though helpful ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upon the pillow of Doubt, because it is the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority of mankind, who say in their hearts: 'Let us think no more of these problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given us so many other ways to get ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... summon thereunto the professor, his daughter, and why not his fair sister Jocasta, as well? We will take them a journey which shall much astonish the venerable Surd. He shall place Abscissa's digits in yours and bless you both with an algebraic formula. Jocasta shall contemplate with wonder the genius of Rivarol. But we have much to do. We must ship to St. Joseph the vast amount of material to be employed in the construction of the Tachypomp. We must engage a small army of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... head. Lady Cashel was, in every sense of the words, continually wrapped up in wools and worsteds. The earl was always equally ponderous, and the specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... is the sign commonly used to indicate the algebraic sum (i.e. the difference between the sum of the minus quantities and ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... incoherence of his language, the flux of words in which he drowned his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed to defects of education, were in reality assumed, and will be sufficiently explained by certain events in the following history. Four sentences, precise as algebraic formulas, sufficed him usually to grasp and solve all difficulties of life and commerce: "I don't know; I cannot; I will not; I will see about it." He never said yes, or no, and never committed himself to writing. If people talked to him ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... connecting the thermal junctions in different sections to the galvanometer makes possible a more accurate control of the temperatures in the various parts, and while the algebraic sum of the temperature differences of the parts may equal zero, it is conceivable that there may be a condition in the calorimeter when there is a considerable amount of heat passing out through the top, for example, compensated ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... moral relations between man and man. He does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. He observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. With the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows something of extension and quantity. Upon these figures and signs his senses rest their knowledge of the abstractions just named. He makes no attempt to learn the nature of things, but only such of their relations as concern himself. He estimates external things ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... great categories,—fast or slow. Man's chief end was to be a brick. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being a good deal cut up. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up in the single word, bore. These expressions come to be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy;—you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the treasury ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... point of view the result of the polarization test is not a single value, but consists of at least two different factors. It may be equal to the algebraic sum of these, or to their difference, according to whether the external conditions on the field were locally and individually favorable or unfavorable. A large amount of sugar may be due to high individual value, with slight subsequent ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... AND DEFINITE.—Whatever attention centers upon stands out sharp and clear in consciousness. Whether it be a bit of memory, an "air-castle," a sensation from an aching tooth, the reasoning on an algebraic formula, a choice which we are making, the setting of an emotion—whatever be the object to which we are attending, that object is illumined and made to stand out from its fellows as the one prominent thing in the mind's eye while the attention rests on it. It ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... not shutting. True, they are not taught to do so, any more than Frenchmen are taught to make gestures. It is in them. They are born with a natural proneness to consider, as if it were a question of algebraic quantities, whether the satisfaction they might impart by shutting the door would not be more than counterbalanced by the dissatisfaction that might accrue from distinctly and unmistakably shutting it. Still, it seems strange how any displeasure could be incurred by the performance of what ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... answered me. I did so and found Captain Nemo busy with calculations in which there was no shortage of X and other algebraic signs. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... evidence presented to him is bewildering, indecisive, and obscure; and it may occur to him that the author is very like an individual who proposes to determine the value of two or three unknown quantities from one simple algebraic equation. His principal witness, Aristides, were he now living and brought up in presence of a jury, would find himself in rather an odd predicament. He is expected to settle the date of the death of Polycarp, and yet he knows nothing either of the pastor of Smyrna or ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... number of general laws, of which they are the necessary consequences. However various and complex may be the phenomena, their laws are few, and distinguished for their exceeding simplicity. All of them may be represented by numbers and algebraic symbols, and these condensed formulae enable us to conduct investigations with the certainty and precision of pure Mathematics. As in geometry, all the properties of figures are deduced from a few axioms and definitions; so when the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Railroad," an ironical application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every human heart; the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... in my mind. The girl must have had a surprising memory for sounds, for she could always repeat the words which I let fall in this way, without, of course, understanding in the least what they meant. I have often been amused at hearing her discharge a volley of chemical equations and algebraic symbols at old Madge, and then burst into a ringing laugh when the crone would shake her head, under the impression, no doubt, that she was being addressed ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thought of establishing such a system, in which geometrically opposite facts—namely, two lines (or areas) which are opposite IN SPACE give ALWAYS a positive product—ever come into anybody's head till I was led to it in October, 1843, by trying to extend my old theory of algebraic couples, and of algebra as the science of pure time? As to my regarding geometrical addition of lines as equivalent to composition of motions (and as performed by the same rules), that is indeed essential in my theory but not peculiar to it; ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... got out, and they sat down to their work; but Hugh could not help observing that David, in the midst of his lines and angles and algebraic computations, would, every now and then, glance up at Margaret, with a look of tenderness in his face yet deeper and more delicate in its expression than ordinary. Margaret was, however, quite unconscious of it, pursuing her work with ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem. ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... geometer is perhaps better understood from the assertion made respecting him by a modern mathematician, that he came as near to the discovery of the Differential Calculus as can be done without the aid of algebraic transformations. Among the special problems he treated of may be mentioned the quadrature of the circle, his determination of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter being between: 3.1428 and 3.1408, the true value, as is now known, being 3.1416 ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... bracket,' he remarked, smiling benevolently, 'which no algebraic process will remove. Let us hope it signifies that you and Buckland will work through life shoulder to shoulder in the field of geology. What ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... brother, courage, at the ghastly deathbed, and strike down the infidel with the lance of evidence and the shield of reason!' In a pecuniary point of view I am confident, nay, the calculations may be established as irresistibly as an algebraic equation, that I can realise, as incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel, the sum of not less than one thousand pounds per annum. Such a sum, with economy (and without it what sum were sufficient?), will enable me to provide amply for my wants, to discharge my obligations ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not suspect that I was then setting myself a double task of this nature, or that many another girl, besides myself, had first begun to chase some "unknown" phantom through the intricate stages of life at the same time that she was puzzling over the hidden meaning of an algebraic equation. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... should have been somewhat harmful with respect to the secondary schools, since the interests of the former seemed to be best met by restricting most of the energies of the secondary teachers of mathematics to the thorough drilling of their students in dexterous formal manipulations of algebraic symbols and the demonstration of fundamental abstract theorems ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper |
