"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Andrews College under the late Dr Jackson, who was an eminent philosopher and friendly man; also under Mr Duncan, of the Mathematical Chair, whom I regarded as a personification of unworldly simplicity, clothed in high and pure thought; and I regularly attended, though not enrolled as a regular student, the Moral Philosophy Class of Dr Chalmers. Returning to Edinburgh and its university, I became acquainted, through ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to teach us that justice to others and to ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses; that the circle of humanity is the limit, and we are but the point in its centre, the drops in the great Atlantic, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... irregularity in the line of the steps which "the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... standards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects, entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining, and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great persistence, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... effort during the practice of Induced Autosuggestion, we use in the world of mind an instrument fashioned for use in the world of matter. It is as if we tried to solve a mathematical problem by mauling the book with ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... herein alluded to a story by the great American romancer, which is a masterpiece. Who has not read the "Gold Bug?" In this novel a cryptogram, composed of ciphers, letters, algebraic signs, asterisks, full-stops, and commas, is submitted to a truly mathematical analysis, and is deciphered under extraordinary conditions, which the admirers of that strange genius can never forget. On the reading of the American document depended only a treasure, while on that of this ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... Cambridge Mathematical Questions (Vol. ix., p. 35.).—These are so far put forth "by authority" as the publication in the Cambridge Calendar, and the two local newspapers goes; a collection of the Senate House Papers for "Honours" from 1838 to 1849, has also been published, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... Admiral (but this you know too, no doubt) to Dollond's, the mathematical instrument maker's, last Monday, to buy that part of his outfit. His sextant (which is about the size and shape of a cocked hat), on being applied to his eye, entirely concealed him. Not the faintest ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... quite soothing after her mathematical mortification, for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. It was really very interesting—the Latin Grammar that ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... of the man who wrote these books was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, but every one knows him better as Lewis Carroll. He was a staid and learned mathematician, who wrote valuable books on most difficult mathematical subjects; for instance, he wrote a Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, and it is not a joke, though the name may sound like one to a person who has read Alice in Wonderland. However, there was one subject in which this grave lecturer on mathematics was more interested than he was in his own ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... behind her, for all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with the circumference. He saw himself diminished to a mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. For Frida he had ceased to have any objective existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what the Colonel would have called an abstraction. There was nothing for him to do but to accept the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... with a description of the German landscape. But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down to Madame de Stael, questions the general significance of place, time, and circumstances as affecting the nature of a literary product, when we come to the exact and as it were mathematical demonstration of the precise workings of these physical influences, our generation is distinctly more cautious than were the literary critics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a hundred years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the manifest character ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Pierre Charles L'Enfant, as the head of a commission appointed by George Washington, then president of the United States. Serving as one of the commissioners, sitting in conference with them and performing an important part in the mathematical calculations involved in the survey, was the Negro mathematician and astronomer, Benjamin Banneker. As there did not appear to be during this celebration any disposition to give proper recognition to the scientific work done by Banneker, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... she really was, as she was even to himself sometimes. But to the soldier what was she? Smaller and smaller she waned up the rigid mathematical road, still gazing at the soldier aloft, as Pierston gazed at her. He could just discern sentinels springing up at the different coigns of vantage that she passed, but seeing who she was they did not intercept her; and presently she crossed the drawbridge over the enormous chasm surrounding the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... resistance des fluides, which contains a large number of original ideas and new observations. In 1746 and 1748 he published in the Memoirs of the Academy of Berlin "Recherches sur le calcul integral,'' a branch of mathematical science which is greatly indebted to him. In his Recherches sur differents points importants du systeme du monde (1754-1756) he perfected the solution of the problem of the perturbations of the planets, which he had presented to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mathematical parsimoniousness and divided into squares which made me think of the Roman agrimensores. But concerning this point, a civilized old native told me the following legend. Long ago, he said, these oases were wild jungles, and the few human creatures ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... ill-drawn diagram, if he were to forget in his reasonings that a point was indivisible, or that the definition of a line excluded breadth, there would be no end to his blunders. The schoolmen tried to reason mathematically about things which had not been, and perhaps could not be, defined with mathematical accuracy. We know the result. Mr Mill has in our time attempted to do the same. He talks of power, for example, as if the meaning of the word power were as determinate as the meaning of the word circle. But, when we analyse his speculations, we ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his materials which would have enabled him to produce a perfect work of art. Hence there are several new beginnings and resumptions and formal or artificial connections; we miss the 'callida junctura' of the earlier dialogues. His speculations about the Eternal, his theories of creation, his mathematical anticipations, are supplemented by desultory remarks on the one immortal and the two mortal souls of man, on the functions of the bodily organs in health and disease, on sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. He soars into the heavens, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... first, and the professor, noticing him unemployed, brought him another paper, this time the mathematical one. As he expected, he did not do quite as well with it. But he felt sure of being right in his answers to six out of the ten questions, and very hopeful about two others, so that altogether he ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... mine host of the Bear being strategus, and king piper lord orator. Well, my lords, it might have been otherwise expressed, but this is well enough a-conscience. In your way, the wit of man shall not prevent this or the like inconvenience; but if this (for I have conferred with artists) be a mathematical demonstration, I could kneel to you, that ere it be too late we might return to some kind of sobriety. If we empty our purses with these pomps, salaries, coaches, lackeys, and pages, what can the people say less than that we have dressed a Senate and a prerogative ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... uniformly along a Horizontal Line.—If the lengths of the links be assumed indefinitely short, the chain under given simple distributions of load will take the form of comparatively simple mathematical curves known as catenaries. The true catenary is that assumed by a chain of uniform weight per unit of length, but the form generally adopted for suspension bridges is that assumed by a chain under a weight uniformly distributed relatively to a horizontal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... legendary air of the Past. The mere humanitarian bards, who try to make modern life trip to the music of trochees, dactyles, and spondees, fail miserably. Industrialism is not poetical. Our modern life expresses itself in machines, in mathematical formulas, in statistics and with scientific precision generally. Art and poetry are pursued in the spirit of past ages, and concern themselves with the symbols, faiths, and ideal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... were indeed egregiously wrong in their judgment because they were completely ignorant of naval warfare, and measured success at sea by mathematical equations just as they measured progress on land by miles. It was only the navies engaged that knew the truth, and they had inadequate means of making their knowledge known. British sailors were loath to admit ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But, as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... Paris, was to acquire the technical information needed for my profession. To this the years 1832 and 1833 were devoted. M. Guerard, a charming fellow, universally liked and an incomparable instructor, was my mathematical teacher. A lieutenant in the navy, M. Hernoux, put me through the course of study of the Naval School. At the same time I set assiduously to work to learn drawing. My first master in this line was M. Barbier, the father of Jules Barbier, the poet and librettist, who, with Emile Augier, was a class-mate ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... which lie outside of that mathematical point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study merely ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... As for the shield of Menelaus, and other shields described in the same words, "every way equal," the epithet is not now allowed to mean "circular." Mr. Leaf, annotating Iliad, I. 306, says that this sense is "intolerably mathematical and prosaic," and translates [Greek: panton eesae] as "well balanced on every side." Helbig renders the epithets in the natural sense, as "circular." [Footnote: Helbig, Homerische Epos, p. 315; cf., on the other ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... said quietly, "the owner of this knife is not a sailor by profession. He is probably a schoolmaster. I can't be sure of that, but I can say this definitely: he is a professional man of some sort, possibly an engineer, but, as I say, more probably a mathematical master. He is left-handed, has red hair, a wife, and at least ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... result of definite, psychological laws, at present little understood. The renaissance of a nation, when from some unascertained cause there is a fresh outburst of interest in ideas, is quite unaccounted for by logical or mathematical laws of development. The French Revolution and the corresponding romantic revival in England are instances of this. A writer like Rousseau does not germinate interest in social and emotional ideas, but merely puts into attractive form a number of ideas vaguely ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... days before the election. It was a powerful campaign document. People had not realised what an avenging hand pursued Tammany, but they now understood that Tweed was a common thief, and that Tilden, by reducing strong suspicion to a mathematical certainty, had closed the mouths ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the tips of his ears. Like all eminent men in the art of figures, he was of an insolent and mathematical probity. "I will take with me, madame," he said, "two orders for the amount agreed upon, payable at my treasury. Will ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... parts may have rotatory as well as vibratory motions, and the axes of rotation form those lines of Magnetic Force which extend in unbroken continuity into regions which no eye has seen.... These lines must not be regarded as mere mathematical abstractions. They are the directions in which the medium is exerting tension like that of a rope, or rather like ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... mathematical calculations by the week, and hand over the results to the navigator. But the navigation of the stream of time is another matter. There is no abstract theory of life that can be studied without living oneself. Life is always concrete; it is built up ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... be oblig'd to the Great Sir Isaac Newton and Doctor Flamstead for their Mathematical Writings, is more easy to imagine than the Improvements which may be made from thence; there's a great deal of Reason to believe, that if a future Age produces a Successor to Sir Isaac, (at present I take it, there's none in the World) ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... to be always equally attracted on all sides, and, thereby, continue without motion, seems to me a supposition fully as hard as to make the sharpest needle stand upright upon its point on a looking-glass. For, if the very mathematical centre of the central particle be not accurately in the very mathematical centre of the attractive power of the whole mass, the particle will not be attracted equally on all sides. And much harder ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... law with us: accordingly, we did so, and in the course of eight or nine years it might have been decided, but just at the legal term approximated in which the decision was to be announced, the river divided itself with mathematical exactitude on each side of the island. This altered the state and law of the question in toto; but, in the meantime, both we and the O'Hallaghans were nearly fractured by the expenses. Now during the lawsuit we usually ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... and with the pecuniary results I made over one-third to my father, as a sort of help to remunerate him for my "keep," and with the rest I purchased tickets of admission to certain classes in the University. I attended the Chemistry course under Dr. Hope; the Geometry and Mathematical course under Professor Wallace; and the Natural Philosophy course under my valued friend and patron Professor Leslie. What with my attendance upon the classes, and my workshop and drawing occupations, my time did not hang at all ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... and Spinoza; according to whom nothing in the universe could possibly have been otherwise than it is. In his "Reflexions sur le Livre de Hobbes," he says, that although the will is determined in all cases by the divine omnipotence, yet is it free from an absolute or mathematical necessity, "because the contrary volition might happen without implying a contradiction." True, the contrary volition might happen without implying a contradiction; for God himself might cause ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... placed all of them on the payroll of his Management. Khouzhik was having his hands full. He had all his top mathematical experts, some of whom even understood the use of the slide-rule, trying to work up a scale of wages. Erskyll loaned him a few of his staff. None of the ideas any of them developed proved workable. Khouzhik had ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... are incompatible with the nature of the female intellect. We have been mistaken.' In England, Miss Ormerod has distinguished herself by her observations on insect life. Very recently a paper was read before the Mathematical Society of London by Mrs. Bryant, Sc.D., on the geometrical form of perfectly regular cell structure, illustrated by models of cube and rhombic dodecahedron. In another section, Mme. Traube Mengarini studies the function of the brain in fishes; while, in our own ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... reached the ceiling. Upon its shelves rested pyramids of shimmering glasses that were never disturbed. Mirrors set in the face of the sideboard multiplied them. Lemons, oranges and paper napkins, arranged with mathematical precision, sat among the glasses. Many-hued decanters of liquor perched at regular intervals on the lower shelves. A nickel-plated cash register occupied a position in the exact centre of the general effect. The elementary senses of it all seemed to ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... to lose entirely one of the two orders of truth—either all the mathematical or all the moral truths—it should not hesitate to sacrifice the mathematical, for though it is true if these were lost the world would suffer immense detriment, yet if we should lose a single one of the moral truths, where would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... youthfulness of these men, which was readily explained by the fact that one vessel out of every five sent out was lost beneath the Arctic ice floes. With an almost mathematical certainty the men in the undersea service could reckon the years of their lives on the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... of opinion existing as to the number of theatres which ought to be licensed in the metropolis. Our friend Peter Borthwick, whose mathematical acquirements are only equalled by his "heavy fathers," has suggested the following formula whereby to arrive at a just conclusion:—Take the number of theatres, multiply by the public-houses, and divide by the dissenting chapels, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... the laity. Sixty monks, and not a single layman! It is a terrible idea, but it is historic, it is statistic; it is indeed one of those facts which enables an intelligent historian to reconstruct the physiognomy of a special epoch, for it brings out this further point with mathematical accuracy, that the clergy were in those days sixty times richer and more flourishing than the rest of humanity and perhaps ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... exceeded by nearly a quarter, in the second by nearly half, the estimated 600,000 tons, and for the present month also we may fairly cherish the best expectations. The technical success guarantees the economic success with almost mathematical exactitude. True, the economic results cannot be so easily expressed numerically and set down in a few big figures as the technical result in the amount of tonnage sunk. The economic effects of the submarine warfare are expressed in many different spheres covering ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... wholly impossible for anyone to describe form in words without the aid of figures. Even the mathematical strength of Euclid would avail nothing, if shorn of his diagrams. The professorial robe is impotent without its diagrams. Anatomy being a science existing by demonstration, (for as much as form in its actuality is the language of nature,) must be discoursed of ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... sir. I have my duty to perform. Anybody can do those childish history and grammatical questions; it is the classical and mathematical lessons in which I wish you to excel. Now, once more. No, no, you must not refer to the book. 'In any right-angled triangle, the square of the side—' ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... space stood a large shamyanah, or flat-roofed tent with open sides, which served as dining-room and general living-room. There are certainly distinct advantages in a climate so settled that periods of daily sunshine or of daily rain really form part of the calendar, and can be predicted with mathematical certainty. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the sense that they are existing magisterial districts. There are arguments for both of these courses. Equal electoral areas have the advantage of being symmetrical and are capable of more strict and mathematical distribution. But the Boers have expressed a very strong desire to have the old magisterial districts preserved. I think it is rather a sentimental view on their part, because upon the whole I think the wastage of Boer votes will, owing to excessive ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... brains, nor numbers, nor money—save ammunition. Does any pessimist intend to argue that we shall not get all the ammunition we need? It is inconceivable that we should not get it. When we have got it the end can be foretold like the answer to a mathematical problem. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... not wealthy. It was reserved exclusively for the purpose of receiving visitors. The furniture, though old, threadbare, and dilapidated, was kept scrupulously clean, and arranged symmetrically. There were a few books on the table, which were always placed with mathematical exactitude, and a set of chairs, so placed as to give one mysteriously the impression that they were not meant to be sat upon. There was also a grate, which never had a fire in it, and was never without a paper ornament in it, the pink and white aspect of which ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... implanted as a "primordium," in the earth itself. To this inevitable induction of Dr. Harvey we are all driven in the end, by those intuitive processes of reasoning which are hardly less conclusive than mathematical induction itself. We may call these "primordia viventium" plastide particles, bioplasts, vital units, or whatsoever we will,—the name is nothing, the working process is everything. Scientific speculation accomplishes nothing, therefore, by its new terminology, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... B—— about it, imploring his most sublime Haughtiness, that when his other more momentous Avocations of Pedantry and Pedagogism will give him an Interval from Wrath and Contention, he will set apart a Moment to consider human Nature Deviliz'd, and give us a Mathematical Anatomical Description of it; with a Map of Satan's Kingdom in the Microcosm of Mankind, and such other Illuminations as to him and his Contemporaries —— and, —— &c. in their great Wisdom shall ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... requirements as do horses physically. You can by no possible means make a mathematician of a scholar who is deficient in the organ of calculation. It is a manifest injustice to hitch such a one beside another who is a perfect racer in the mathematical field. It is not fair to either of them. I claim that each child should be treated upon his individual merits, and in accordance with the natural gifts that God has bestowed upon him. The graded school system is in direct opposition to this idea, ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... this people have invented certain tubes by which the vril fluid can be conducted towards the object it is meant to destroy, throughout a distance almost indefinite; at least I put it modestly when I say from 500 to 1000 miles. And their mathematical science as applied to such purpose is so nicely accurate, that on the report of some observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril department can estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and the ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with all that quiet caution which one uses who, conscious of fat, trusts his person to the influence of a summer sky. Mr Simpson, such was the name of this worthy pedestrian, passed under the denomination of a mathematical tutor, though it was now some time since he had been known to have any pupil. He was now bent from the village of ——— to the country-seat of Sir John Steventon, which lay in its neighbourhood. He had received the unusual honour of an invitation to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... of character, great perseverance and ambition to excel are shown in the strenuous manner in which he overcame all these obstacles, and at the close of his college career at St. John's, Cambridge, became a wrangler in the Mathematical ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... had any mathematical problems or solutions in his mind, would never quit the subject on any account; dinner was often known to be three hours ready for him before he could be brought to table. His man often said, when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... Oxford in 1550, and met many times at St. Mary's Church. No documentary evidence of their treatment of libraries remains, but it was certainly most drastic. Any illuminated manuscript, or even a mathematical treatise illustrated with diagrams, was deemed unfit to survive, and was thrown out for sale or destruction. Some of the college libraries did not suffer severely. Most of Grey's books survived in Balliol, although ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... they straightway set to work. The boy had an excellent head for such things; and his mathematical knowledge, together with the preparatory study in fortifications he had already pursued in the school, did him ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... Dr. Johnson rode from Birmingham to Derby with his Tetty, taking the opportunity of the journey to give his bride her first lesson in marital discipline. At a later period James Watt rode from Glasgow to London, when proceeding thither to learn the art of mathematical instrument making. ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the schoolroom, and so on, would all be object images. A word or abstract image is one which is a symbol. It stands for and represents certain sensory experiences, the quality of which does not appear in the image. Any word, number, mathematical or chemical symbol—in fact, any abstract symbol will come under this type of image. If in the first list of illustrations, instead of having images of the real objects, an individual had images of words in each case, the ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... strictly accurate, they mislead instead of guiding aright. The mind is easily imposed upon by the false affectation of exactness, which prevails even in the misstatements of science, and it adopts with confidence errors which are dressed in the forms of mathematical truth. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... those at Delhi, Matra on the Jumna, and Oujein, were built by Jey-Sing, Rajah of Jayanagar, upwards of 200 years ago; his skill in mathematical science was so well known, that the Emperor Mahommed Shah employed him to reform the calendar. Mr. Hunter, in the "Asiatic Researches," gives a translation of the lucubrations of this really enlightened man, as contained in the introduction to ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... that I love art, though I am no expert at it; let him if he likes despise my plate, I never pretended it was a work of art." And in a later letter he speaks "of the armillary spheres drawn by our common friend Albert Duerer." He was one of those who helped Duerer in his mathematical and geometrical studies; and he, like Pirkheimer, dedicated books to him. Although the mathematics of those times are hardly considered seriously nowadays, they then ranked with verse-making as a polite accomplishment, and had all the charm of novelty. Duerer, no doubt, had some gift that ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... received orders to march at a moment's warning." The alarm, however, passed away. At the end of 1804, the two boys received prizes; William got one in arithmetic and another in the Rector's composition class; and John also obtained two, one in the mathematical class, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... (per) a direct (directam) line." Now a direct line toward the north can be no other than a meridian line. Had it been merely a straight line of vague northerly direction which was meant, rectum, the usual expression for a mathematical straight line, would have been used instead of directam. It is, moreover, to be considered that the Romans had names both for the northeast and northwest points of the compass, and that the expression "versus septentrionem" in its most vague application could ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... of. Gagry, maritime defile of. Gaisue, officer of Kublai's Mathematical Board. Galeasse, Venetian gallery. Galingale. Galletti, Marco. Galleys of the Middle Ages, war, arrangement of rowers; number of oars; dimensions; tactics in fight; toil in rowing; strength and cost ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... thousand miles up and down. It has been the custom of the land-robbing and sea-robbing Anglo-Saxon to give the law to conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh. But in the case of Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak. In the mathematical nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment to be accorded him. The punishment was a foregone conclusion, there could be no doubt of that; and though it was capital, Imber had but one life, while the tale against him was ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... have also been received from Albert E. Seibert, New York city, and Annie B. Stephens, Elizabeth, New Jersey. Several correct answers to the mathematical puzzles have been sent in, and will be published as soon as other correspondents have had time to try ...
— Harper's Young People, November 25, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... not so infinitely complex and involved, if we were in a position to take a complete view of the historical evolution of the psychic functions, we could reduce the whole of them (including consciousness) to a mathematical "soul-formula." ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... called a Kashtha. Thirty Kashthas would make what is called a Kala. Thirty Kalas, with the tenth part of a Kala added, make what is known as a Muhurta. Thirty Muhurtas make up one day and night. Thirty days and nights are called a month, and twelve months are called a year. Persons conversant with mathematical science say that a year is made up of two ayanas (dependent on sun's motion), viz., the northern and the southern. The sun makes the day and the night for the world of man. The night is for the sleep of all living creatures, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... lost the day, one might have hoped to have come off for eight battalions. Then they tell you that the French had four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is a still stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the French. This loss was balanced by a pompous account of the triumphs of our invasion of Bretagne; which, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... cemetery for smaller organisms, is in reality his brick-field and rope-walk, and out of this minute sack he will produce endless miles of cordage and web which he weaves into the most beautiful and mathematical harmonies. This is a self-contained utility which might be imitated by men with advantage, and that which is done with ease by a spider can scarcely offer insuperable difficulty to the chief of the vertebrates. Of course, each man's production will be more or less guided and limited by his ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... prepare for the mathematical studies of the following year, Alec went to the school again in the morning of most days, Mr Malison being well able to render him all the assistance he required. The first time he made his appearance at the door, a silence as of death was ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... accounted for. The sea, when gales are blowing and tides are rising and falling, is anything but a static object, and yet it keeps a general level in spite of storms and tides, and the surface of it as a whole is surprisingly near to the ideal mathematical surface that would be presented if all disturbances were to cease. In like manner there are certain influences that are disturbing the economic equilibrium just as storms and tidal waves disturb the equilibrium ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... and conjugal companions,—upon religion and morals, the administration of justice and government, penal and reformatory law, the exploration of antiquity, the philosophy of art and eloquence, and the cultivation of all sciences except the mathematical. Anthropology must, therefore, become the guide and guardian of humanity, and, as such, will be illustrated by the "Journal of Man." It will indulge in no rash ultraism or antagonism, but will kindly appreciate truth ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... chap for me," said an eminent man on a momentous occasion. "If a parent asks a question in the classical, commercial, or mathematical-line, says I gravely, 'Why, sir, in the first place, are you a philosopher?' 'No, Mr. Squeers,' he says, 'I ain't.' 'Then, sir,' says I, 'I am sorry for you, for I shan't be able to explain it.' Naturally, the parent goes away and ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... fond, while carefully keeping a shielding bunch of paper work in a place to make it appear that she was officially busy. The captain's horoscope, she recognized, didn't look much worse than the rest of them, but was definitely the worst. One of those mathematical jumbles that somehow didn't interpret clearly. None of them ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... and sound alike depend on certain mathematical measurements, and on rhythmical vibrations, there must be a real and tangible relation between these elements, though applied to obtain different results. In music, as in all art, harmony is, or ought to be, a first consideration. We have seen by experiment how a note ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... mathematical regularity in these works. In their form, the builders were guided merely by the nature of the ground. Frequently a precipice or river sufficed for partial defence, and the line of embankment occurs only on one or two sides. In one instance, distinct traces of a double line ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... asseverations of innocence are always deserving of consideration by the executive, what is there to invest them with a conclusive efficacy, in opposition to a chain of presumptive evidence, the force and weight of which falls short only of mathematical demonstration?' The astute and eloquent counsel for defence, has cited some well-known cases, to shake your faith in the value ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... has not only employed every abstract conclusion and formula of mathematics, whether derived from the study of the earth or the heavens, but the whole structure may be said to rest upon a mathematical foundation. The great discoveries of chemistry, showing the composition of water, the nature of gases, the properties of metals; the laws and processes of physics, from the strains and pressures of mighty masses to the delicate ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... prove every piece exactly, the same width; and even when you play a Meditation? I'm sure the metronome would waggle in perfect unison with your tempo. I wonder—" She glanced up at him speculatively. "—I wonder if you think with such mathematical precision. Do you always find that two and ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... Interest he endeavoured to inform himself of all the Christians in the country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were still under such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them.' Guthrie is almost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, he demonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-important things he sets out to prove. There is no room for rhetoric on a finger- post; in a word, and, sometimes without a word, a finger-post tells you the right way to take to get to your journey's end. And many who have wandered into ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... Honore. His foot was less painful after his good night's rest. His wonder and admiration were again excited by the neatness and perfect order that prevailed throughout the encampment, the six guns of a battery aligned with mathematical precision and accompanied by their caissons, prolonges, forage-wagons, and forges. A short way off, lined up to their rope, stood the horses, whinnying impatiently and turning their muzzles to the rising sun. He had no difficulty in finding Honore's tent, thanks to the regulation which assigns to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Gladstone, that, as respects religion, "the association of these two ideas, activity of inquiry, and variety of conclusion, is a fallacious one." We might just as well turn the argument the other way, and infer from the variety of religious opinions that there must necessarily be hostile mathematical sects, some affirming, and some denying, that the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the sides. But we do not think either the one analogy or the other of the smallest value. Our way of ascertaining the tendency of free inquiry is simply to open our ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Charleston factors, the Charleston Courier and Mercury and the New York Journal of Commerce. The latter sheet, at the date of which I am writing, was in wide circulation at the South, its piety (!) and its politics being then calculated with mathematical ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the railway passes from Derry to Omagh is one long stretch of beauty, fertility and careful tillage. Every field, whatever its shape, is cultivated up to the fence and into the corners with a mathematical nicety. The regular fields, the green separating ditches with their grassy covering, the hills cultivated to the very tops, and the trees growing here and there all over made a landscape that should delight the heart of a farmer. Whenever I come to careless ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... objects, with the subjective mind we see only subjective objects. This was Paul's doctrine and it is the belief of the best psychic thought of this century. By means of our reason— an objective process for divining the future—aided by mathematical and geographical data, we may outline the storm centers and the path of the rain days before they appear in certain localities. After eliminating all contingencies arising from clerical error and counteracting influence, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... he had been going without opium he had known nothing like proper sleep. I desire to be understood with mathematical literalness. There had been periods when he had been semi-conscious; when the outline of things in his room grew vaguer and for five minutes he had a dull sensation of not knowing where he was. This temporary numbness was the only state which in all that ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Blimber's establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber's cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no consequence at all. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... which contained the stationery. She pushed it out of sight on the shelf, and sat down again to her book. Her mother ought to be coming in now. Susy would have to do a lot of exercises; these she could not by any possibility do in the shop. She had also some mathematical work to get through or she would never be able to keep her place in class. Why didn't Mrs. Hopkins return? Half-an-hour went by; three-quarters. It was now a quarter to eight. Susy felt quite distracted. ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... of our weakness, also, that we commonly assume Nature to be a rather fragile and merely ornamental thing, and suited for a model of the graces only. But her seductive softness is the last climax of magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth. The thistle-down floats secure upon the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... at Webster University. He had chatted with Miss Fannie Newman—a pretty student in the Woman's College—after nine o'clock; nay, more, he had sat on a campus bench bidding her good night for half an hour, and, with that brilliant mathematical mind of his, had selected the bench at the greatest possible distance from the smallest ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... hygiene and the rearing of children, domestic economy, embroidery, music and singing. There are further special pedagogical schools for the training of teachers, and there is a University at Sofia having chairs for Historico-Philological, Physico-Mathematical, and legal courses. This University is beginning to take the place of foreign universities for the training of young Bulgaria for public life. The training is narrower but, on the whole, probably better from a national point of view. Only the more seasoned minds of a young nation ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... discern whether every thing was in order. Not fancying something about the mats, he rolled them up into bundles, and one by one sent them flying at the heads of his servitors; who, upon that gentle hint made off with them, soon after returning with fresh ones. These, with mathematical precision, Media in person now spread on the dais; looking carefully to the fringes or ruffles with which they were bordered, as if striving to impart to them a ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... approximation is real. Approach is a relative term, indicating that one has come nearer than before, tho the distance may yet be considerable; an approximation brings one really near. Nearness, neighborhood, and propinquity are commonly used of place; approximation, of mathematical calculations and abstract reasoning; we speak of approach to the shore, nearness to the town, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Veneto—in the year 1619. That Sarpi was the real author admits of no doubt. The book bears every stamp of genuineness. It is written in the lucid, nervous, straightforward style of the man, who always sought for mathematical precision rather than rhetorical elegance in his use of language. Sarpi had taken special pains to collect materials for a History of the Council; and in doing so he had enjoyed exceptional advantages. Early in his manhood he formed at Mantua a close friendship ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that the only "escape" offered by the reality of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an assertion that the form of this spectacle is unfixed and wavering. No psychological or mathematical speculation has the power to alter the essential outlines of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... for the business, mathematical, and scientific mind of Germany, that I cannot believe she will prefer the destruction of the German people, individually or collectively, to the destruction of the German war-machine which set on ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... the present day, and few of the fellowship during two or three generations past, have encountered the scarce and curious little volume here presented, as in a friendly literary resurrection— Robert Antrobus's "The Square of Sevens, and the Parallelogram." Its mathematical title hardly hints at the amusement that the book affords. With its solemn faith in the gravity of its mysteries, with its uncertain spellings and capital-icings such as belong to even the Eighteenth Century's ...
— The Square of Sevens - An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note • E. Irenaeus Stevenson
... the adventure with the joy and enthusiasm of a child—combined with the clear sight and mental grasp of an extraordinary intellect. He really never crystallized mentally. He had no false sense of values. Conventional or habitual values meant nothing to him. The only values he recognized were mathematical and scientific facts. My father was a great man. He had the mind and the soul that only great men have. In ways he was even greater than Ernest, than whom I have known ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... name of "abacus'' is also given, in logic, to an instrument, often called the "logical machine,'' analogous to the mathematical abacus. It is constructed to show all the possible combinations of a set of logical terms with their negatives, and, further, the way in which these combinations are affected by the addition of attributes or other limiting words, i.e. to simplify ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... which the committee were obliged to draw, if they regarded mathematical accuracy, of the room allotted to the slaves in this vessel. By this picture was exhibited the nature of the Elysium which Mr. Norris and others had invented for them during their transportation ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... affections could desire. He is not one of those premature geniuses whose much-vaunted infantine talents disappear along with adolescence; he is not, I frankly own, more advanced in his classical and mathematical studies than some children even younger than himself; but he has acquired the rudiments of health; he has laid in a store of honesty and good-humour, which are not less likely to advance him in life ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... just notion of the stature. The work will have to be done over, and time sacrificed, if this is not attended to. The adjustment of the head to the size of the plate (as seen from the margin of the mat), is not to be taught: everyone must bring himself, by scrutinizing practice, to mathematical accuracy; for something will be discovered in every face which can be surmounted only ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey |
