"Mathematician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic bloom, and Becomes the abstract experience of the mathematician. The physical movement is sacrificed to the mechanical or mathematical; geometry is proclaimed as the chief science. Materialism takes to misanthropy. In order to overcome misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... science of anatomy, and the Talmud demonstrates that certain Mishna ordinances are based upon geometrical propositions, which could have been known to but few mathematicians of that time. Rabbi Gamaliel, said to have made use of a telescope, was celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer, and in 289 C. E., Rabbi Joshua is reported to have calculated the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally different direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless this meant that I really did not have the intense devotion to science which I thought I had; for, if I had possessed such devotion, I would have carved out a career ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? [Would that this was so:—error, superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Khaldun (died 1406), Makrisi (died 1442), Suyuti (died 1505), and Makkari (died 1631), are only a few of those who have given us large and comprehensive histories. Al-Biruni (died 1038), writer, mathematician, and traveler, has left us an account of the India of his day which has earned for him the title "Herodotus of India," though for careful observation and faithful presentation he stands far above the writer with whose name he is adorned. But nearly all of these historical ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... M. E. Desjardins, in his "Geographie de la Gaule Romaine," "to understand the slight importance which has been attributed to his works as a geographer, mathematician, and draughtsman." The latter more especially do justice to his great merit. D'Anville was the first to construct a map by scientific methods, and that of itself is sufficient glory. In the department of historical geography, D'Anville exhibited unusual good sense in discussion, and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... much less prescribed, is the best guidance for developing the habit of rapid cursory reading. Others before professor De Long, of Colorado, have held that the power of reading a page in moment, as a mathematician sums up a column of figures and as the artist Dore was able to read a book by turning the leaves, can be attained by training and practise. School pressure should not suppress this instinct of omnivorous reading, which at this age sometimes prompts the resolve to read ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... was not a good artist; indeed he was nothing but a humpbacked and very sensitive little squire with about 3000 a year of his own and great liking for intricate amusements. He was a pretty good mathematician and a tolerable fisherman. He knew an enormous amount about the Mohammedan conquest of Spain, and he is, I believe, writing a book upon that subject. I hope he will, for nearly all history wants to be rewritten. Anyhow, he, as I have just said, did copy a corner of one of the Dutch pictures in ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... could with a well-made hand reel, and if the wind wasn't too strong. But your arms would soon give out. Of course, the pull of a kite depends on the amount of square feet of sail area. Anton," he added, turning to the crippled lad, "you're the mathematician of the League, measure that kite and tell us how many square feet ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... Protagoras, but he is very reluctant to leave his retirement and defend his old master. He is too old to learn Socrates' game of question and answer, and prefers the digressions to the main argument, because he finds them easier to follow. The mathematician, as Socrates says in the Republic, is not capable of giving a reason in the same manner as the dialectician, and Theodorus could not therefore have been appropriately introduced as the chief respondent. But he may be fairly appealed to, when ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... to believe, and but for the irrefutable records of the Court, few would credit the fact that every one of these letters was in the French language! And the dupe a highly educated mathematician of European repute. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... own private purposes. But Eglentyne was not at all wicked or dishonest, though she was a bad manager; the fact was that she had no head for figures. I am sure that she had no head for figures; you have only got to read Chaucer's description of her to know that she was not a mathematician. Besides the nuns were exaggerating: their clothes were not in holes, only just a little threadbare. Madame Eglentyne was far too fastidious to allow ragged clothes about her; and as to the roof of the church, she had meant to save enough money to ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... poet?" I asked. "There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... He was "a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humorist of ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... are corrupted at the very source; they begin life by trampling on all their younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated so to do;—that the idea of an hereditary legislator is as absurd as an hereditary mathematician;—that a body holding themselves unaccountable to anybody ought to be trusted by nobody;—that it is continuing the uncivilized principles of governments founded in conquest, and the base idea of man having a property in man, and governing him by a personal right;—that aristocracy has ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... assumption, for the amount of energy in a swiftly moving body capable of being transformed into heat if the body be arrested is relatively enormous. Thus it is calculated that a pound of coal dropped into the sun from the mathematician's favorite starting-point, infinity, would produce some six thousand times the heat it could engender if merely burned at the sun's surface. In other words, if a little over two pounds of material from infinity were to fall into each square ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... natural philosophy. If he is a theologian the first moment he gives himself up to meditation, he is on the road to the Baconian method the very day he begins to labour. The rudest workman uses the lever; the mathematician follows and calculates the law which determines the power it bestows; here we have industry and then science, but what room for the intervention ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... up his favourite position, in his throne-shaped chair—one leg bent, the other stretched out, displaying to advantage the shapely calf and well-shod foot. M. le prefet Fourier, mathematician of great renown, and member of the Institut was one of those converted Bonapartists to whom it behoved at all times to teach a lesson ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... their spiritual friends, died miserably—the man by leaping out of a window, and the master in great poverty. Dee is the less excusable, because he was a man of family and considerable learning, a fellow of Trinity-college, Cambridge, and a good mathematician. But, in an age in which one Queen imprisoned him for practising by enchantment against her life, and her successor required him to name a lucky day for her coronation, is it to be wondered that a mere man, like tens of thousands ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... bandage over his eyes. "Well!" thought he, "it is a strange thing to play at blind man's buff with a lantern in your hand. Am I beginning to dream again? And, good heavens! he is talking to himself. If he be not drunk or mad, he is a mathematician." ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... talents enabled him to do his part very well in Dr. Johnson's company. He produced two epitaphs upon his father, the celebrated mathematician[142]. One was in English, of which Dr. Johnson did not change one word. In the other, which was in Latin, he made several alterations. In place of the very words of Virgil, 'Ubi luctus et pavor et plurima mortis imago[143],' he wrote 'Ubi luctus regnant et pavor.' He introduced ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that they were as brown and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... now how a mathematician could write 'Alice in Wonderland'," Helen Nash remarked to Marion after Mr. Stanlock had withdrawn to the diningroom ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... shillings the pound weight, whereas the best Iuory is solde for halfe the money: the graine of the bone is somewhat more yellow then the Iuorie. One M. Alexander Woodson of Bristoll my old friend, an excellent Mathematician and skilful Phisition, shewed me one of these beasts teeth which were brought from the Isle of Ramea in the first prize, which was half a yard long or very little lesse: and assured mee that he had made tryall of it in ministering medicine to his patients, and had found it ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... Old North Road by turning to the left before entering Buntingford. It is a small, quiet, unimportant village; but much of it is picturesque and interesting. Readers will remember that Macaulay was at school here, and that it was the birthplace of Seth Ward, mathematician and bishop, a contemporary and antagonist of Thomas Hobbes. The church is a flint structure,—a conglomeration of many styles. Notable features are the Easter sepulchre in the N. wall of chancel, ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... some stout hearts in Edinburgh who did their best to keep up the courage of the rest and to keep out the enemy. Andrew Fletcher and Duncan Forbes were of the number. M'Laurin, the mathematician, turned his genius to the bettering of the fortifications. Old {212} Dr. Stevenson, bedridden but heroic, kept guard in his armchair for many days at the Netherbow Gate. The great question was would Cope ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... a ringed mountain nine thousand feet high, and one of those circles so numerous on this satellite. With regard to this, Barbicane related Kepler's singular opinion on the formation of circles. According to that celebrated mathematician, these crater-like cavities had been dug by ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... hark back to the Aristarchian conception in the new scientific era that was now dawning was the noted cardinal, Nikolaus of Cusa, who lived in the first half of the fifteenth century, and was distinguished as a philosophical writer and mathematician. His De Docta Ignorantia expressly propounds the doctrine of the earth's motion. No one, however, paid the slightest attention to his suggestion, which, therefore, merely serves to furnish us with another interesting illustration of the futility of propounding even ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections, he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... What did the famous mathematician think of this effusion in the heyday of the Empire, when he became Count of Pelusium with a Westphalian estate bringing in 200,000 francs a year? A collection of the frank confessions of the ci-devant Jacobins would form an ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... mathematician and a physicist, and I found him freely communicative. He was so kind as to mention and explain to me the many various problems he had set before himself to work out. This caused my long slumbering and suppressed love for mathematics as a science, and for physics, to spring up again, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... Babbage pushed it away. Marryat tied a string from his wrist to the door handle, and Babbage unfastened it. A thicker string was cut, a chain was unlinked by pliers, but at last the future captain forged a chain that was too stout for the future mathematician. Babbage, however, secured his revenge; as soon as his comrade was safely asleep he slipped a piece of pack thread through the chain and, carrying the other end to his own bed, was enabled by a few rapid jerks to waken Marryat whenever he chose. ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... in his Book Entituled The Court of Love: And in Oxford by all likelihood, in Canterbury or in Merton Colledge, improving his Time in the University, he became a witty Logician, a sweet Rhetorician, a grave Philosopher, a holy Divine, a skilful Mathematician, and a pleasant Poet; of whom, for the Sweetness of his Poetry, may be said that which is reported of Stesichorus; and as Cethegus was called Suadae Medulla, so may Chaucer be rightly called the Pith and Sinews ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor. Brailsford says that his inventions were "partly useful, partly whimsical." They would be, of course. They included a crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor—besides his really big ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... in the July number of "The Masses" is a message to the citizens of the United States entitled War and Individual Liberty, penned by Bertrand Russell, the distinguished English philosopher and mathematician. It is dated February 21, 1917, prior to the U.S. declaration of war, but could not be published before July. Russell recalls the self-sacrifice of the conscientious objectors in Britain, and the persecutions to which they have been exposed. He extols ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... that our friend Sampson, although a profound scholar and mathematician, had not travelled so far in philosophy as to doubt the reality of witchcraft or apparitions. Born, indeed, at a time when a doubt in the existence of witches was interpreted as equivalent to a justification of their infernal practices, a belief of such legends had been impressed upon the Dominie ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... factitious, mere excrescences on the fair surface of art. But he was a born colorist, and sought to arouse the imagination by stupendous orchestral effects, frescoes of tone wherein might be discerned terrifying perspectives, sinister avenues of drooping trees melting into iron dusks. If Pobloff was a mathematician, he was also a painter-poet. He did not credit the theory of the alienists, that the confusion of tone and color—audition coloree—betrayed the existence of a slight mental lesion; and he laughed consumedly at the notion of confounding musicians ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... this moment the portraits of many notable gentlemen (for true gentlemen they are, though their purses are thin) who have given up their lives to educating the progeny of the inclement North. Lamont, for example, whom I remember as a first-class mathematician, is living in the marshy navel of an Outer Isle, amid wild-fowl and spirals of peat-reek. If you want to visit him you have (1) to cross the billowy western deep; (2) drive fifteen miles in a trap; (3) traverse a four-mile arm of the sea in a ferry that needs baling; ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and consequently exhibited herself to him in all her varying aspects. It was the first time they had been looked upon by a human eye, since its unaided powers do not enable it to discern them, although one exception to this rule is said to have existed. This was the case of the Swiss mathematician Gauss, who, when a child, on being shown the crescent star through the telescope, exclaimed to his mother that it "was turned wrong"; the inference being that he recognized the reversal of the image in the field of the glass. If it were indeed so, he deserves to rank with the Siberian ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... been the birthplace of many learned men—as, Ortelius, an eminent mathematician and antiquary of the sixteenth century, and the friend of our Camden; Gorleus, a celebrated medallist, of the same period; Andrew Schott, a learned Jesuit, and the friend of Scaliger; Lewis Nonnius, a distinguished physician and erudite scholar, born early ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... nevertheless some antecedents. M. Cauchy, a few years previously President of the Chamber of the Royal Court of Paris, an amiable man and easily frightened, was the brother of the mathematician, member of the Institute, to whom we owe the computation of waves of sound, and of the ex-Registrar Archivist of the Chamber of Peers. M. Delapalme had been Advocate-General, and had taken a prominent part in the Press trials under the Restoration; M. Pataille had been Deputy ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Kelvin, was born at Belfast on the 26th of June, 1824. His father was a distinguished mathematician, and was Professor of Mathematics, first in Belfast, and afterwards in Glasgow University. At a very early age, Lord Kelvin showed extraordinary mathematical ability; and he passed with great distinction, first through the University of Glasgow, and then through Cambridge, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a fountain inexhaustible of thoughts and kept me ever curious and expectant. Nothing was too great, nothing too beautiful for his grasp or his expression, and as brilliant as his power of illustration was, he stuck like a mathematician to his truth and never added a syllable for display. I cannot tell you how much I have valued his conversation for these last two or three years, and he has never stopped growing, but has ripened from month to month. Indeed, the weight of his thoughts and the fresh ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... hesitating because of a little French girl. Umph! I've no patience with you, but, young man, you've got to decide before to-morrow's mail goes out. I must write to Lady McAllister. Good-bye I'm going for a walk to the light-house. The keeper is a most interesting man, and a great mathematician. Good-bye. I hope next time I see you you'll have ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... was at that time that, being in Holland, which is his native country, and having till then not been in trade at all, he received from England a copy of the Arithmetica Logarithmica of the famous mathematician Henry Briggs [published 1624]. Greatly enamoured with this work and with the whole new science of Logarithms, and observing that Briggs had given the Logarithms for numbers only from 1 to 20,000, and then from 90,000 to 100,000, he ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... "from time immemorial." The account proceeds as follows:—"This book, the terror of the dilatory and unapt, having at length been completely mastered, the class, as their acquaintance with the Greek mathematician is about to close, assemble in their respective places of meeting, and prepare (secretly for fear of the Faculty) for the anniversary. The necessary committee having been appointed, and the regular preparations ordered, a ceremony has sometimes taken place like the following. The ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... chosen subject. The entomologist sees bugs everywhere, the botanist sees only plants, the mechanic sees only machines, the preacher sees only the moral and religious aspects of action, the doctor sees only disease, the mathematician sees always the quantitative aspect of things. Ideas and perceptions related to one's chosen work go at once and readily to the focus of consciousness; other things ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... subject which has been run into subtleties among ourselves, Chrysippus estimated that the changes which could be rung on ten propositions exceeded a million, but for this assertion he was taken to task by Hipparchus the mathematician, who proved that the affirmative proposition yielded exactly 103,049 forms and the negative 310,962. With us the affirmative proposition is more prolific in consequences than the negative. But then, the Stoics were not content ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... always from the same point of view, takes from the mind flexibility, weakens the imagination, and puts fetters on the soul; and hence though it is important that there be specialists, the kind of education by which they are formed, while it is suited to make a geologist, a chemist, a mathematician, or a botanist, is not suited to call forth the free and harmonious play of all man's powers. We do not live on facts alone, much less on facts of a single kind. Religion and poetry, love, hope, and imagination are as essential ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... threshold distance. Furthermore, there being no distinct line of demarcation between one and two, there must be many sensations which are just about as much like one as they are like two, and hence they must be lumped off with one or the other group. To the mathematician one and two are far apart in the series because he has fractions in between, but we perceive only in terms of whole numbers; hence all sensations which might more accurately be represented by fractions must be classed with the nearest whole number. A sensation is due to a combination of factors. ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... I don't think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in algebra: it WOULDN'T come right; but instead a whole ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... scientific plans of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. He also is a man of known ability, but chiefly employed in that peculiar department. Item Professors Lloyd and Owen: the former, of Dublin, son of the late Provost, I had seen before and knew; a great mathematician and optician, and a discoverer in those matters; with a clever little Wife, who has a great deal of knowledge, quite free from pretension. Owen is a first-rate comparative anatomist, they say the greatest since Cuvier; lives in London, and lectures there. On the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... not always result from a good system of education for the young aspirants; for a man may be a good mathematician and a fine scholar, without being a good warrior. The staff should always possess sufficient consideration and prerogative to be sought for by the officers of the several arms, and to draw together, in this way, men who are already known by their aptitude for war. Engineer and ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... in all parts of the world whose good opinion is worth having, Simon Newcomb was one of the best known of America's great men. Astronomer, mathematician, economist, novelist, he had well-nigh boxed the compass of human knowledge, attaining eminence such as is given to few to reach, at more than one of its points. His fame was of the far-reaching kind,—penetrating to remote regions, while ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and mathematician, was a very irritable man, which led him frequently into passions, of which one was the cause of his death in 1742. In other respects he was reckoned a very amiable character; but was apt to be so absent, or absorbed in his studies, as to appear almost wholly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... of Daniel, therefore, itself proves to us that king Nebuchadnezzar was perfectly justified in the high estimate which he formed of the attainments of the four Hebrew children. Certainly one of them, Daniel, was a better instructed mathematician and astronomer than any Chaldean who had ever been brought ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... was Sir Lionel Borridge, the inventor of the most up-to-date calculating machine, and a mathematician of renown. He had a conical brow like a beautifully polished knee, and very sad eyes which seemed to proclaim to the world that the study of mathematics was, on the whole, a most harrowing occupation. With him came his aged wife and spinster daughter. Both appeared to be over fifty, and, like ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a—well, he called himself a psionic mathematician. Actually, he had quite a respectable reputation in the mathematical field. He did very important work in cybernetic theory, but he dropped it several years ago—said that the human mind couldn't be worked at from a mechanistic ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... in ether, light certainly is; but what does one mean by the term wave? The popular notion is, I suppose, of something heaving up and down, or, perhaps, of something breaking on the shore in which it is possible to bathe. But if you ask a mathematician what he means by a wave, he will probably reply that the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... Savilian Professor, and Dr. Wilkins the Protector's brother-in-law. The latter has published a dissertation on the Moon and its Inhabitants, "with a discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither;" and the former, a mighty mathematician, during the recent war had displayed a terrible ingenuity in deciphering the intercepted letters of the Royalists. Their companion is the famous physician Dr. Willis, in whose house, opposite the Vice-Chancellor's own door, the Oxford Prelatists daily assemble to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... planned. There remained only to fit the last parts together. The idea of building an air-ship had come to him while he lay dying with scurvy, as they thought, in a Confederate prison, and he had never abandoned it. He had been a teacher and a student, and was a trained mathematician. There could be no flaw in his calculations. He had worked them out again and again. The energy developed by his plan was great enough to float a ship capable of carrying almost any burden, and of ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... gens. Boethius, whose name we have already met with as the skilful mechanic who was requested to construct a water-clock and a sun-dial for the king of the Burgundians, was a man of great and varied accomplishments—philosopher, theologian, musician, and mathematician. He had translated thirty books of Aristotle into Latin for the benefit of his countrymen; his treatise on Music was for many centuries the authoritative exposition of the science of harmony. He had held the high honour of the consulship in 510; twelve years later he had the yet higher honour ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... wandered over many lands, and even visited London, where he stayed in 1158. Ibn Ezra was famed, not only for his poetry, but also for his brilliant wit and many-sided learning. As a mathematician, as a poet, as an expounder of Scriptures, he won a high place in Jewish annals. In his commentaries he rejected the current digressive and allegorical methods, and steered a middle course between free research on the one hand, and blind adherence ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... I do not think you will get any hints from him. I have lately had many more "kicks than halfpence." A review in the last Dublin "Nat. Hist. Review" is the most unfair thing which has appeared,—one mass of misrepresentation. It is evidently by Haughton, the geologist, chemist and mathematician. It shows immeasurable conceit and contempt of all who are not mathematicians. He discusses bees' cells, and puts a series which I have never alluded to, and wholly ignores the intermediate comb of Melipona, which alone led me to my notions. The article is a curiosity ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... his present freshness— and from the fact that it was a morning sun that shone through the openings—that he must have slept the clock round. It did not matter. He knew it did not matter in the least. He had no more plan than a mathematician has who starts to solve a problem, knowing that twice two is four in infinite combination. Like the mathematician, he knew that ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... give their works a conspicuous place. In other cities, the men alone have their Casino dei Nobili, where they give balls and conversazioni. Here, women have one, and are the soul of society. In Milan, also, I see, in the Ambrosian Library, the bust of a female mathematician. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 'school', engaged the best teachers he could find. John Clement, afterwards Wolsey's first Reader in Humanity at Oxford, and William Gonell, Erasmus' friend at Cambridge, read Sallust and Livy with them. Nicholas Kratzer, the Bavarian mathematician, also one of Wolsey's Readers at Oxford, taught them astronomy: to know the pole-star and the dog, and to contemplate the 'high wonders of that mighty and eternal workman', whom More could feel revealed ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... air of a mathematician who has been asked how much of the multiplication table he can ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight over 'Coke upon Lyttleton.' He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it inspired him with zeal and earnestness, and made him more successful than he otherwise would have been. All hopeful persons are not successful, but nearly all the successful ones, in the various callings of life, were hopeful from the beginning. This was true of Nathaniel Bowditch, the great mathematician, who was a poor boy when he commenced his studies. He said that whenever he undertook any thing "it never occurred to him for a moment that he could fail." This quality thus encouraged him to press on from one success to ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... no fooling—even for an expert," the mathematician agreed. "No wonder the astronomers think you birds are the ones who are gumming up their dope. Well, it's about time to plug in on E2. Here's where the fireworks start!" He closed the connections ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... distinguished Mathematician, several years Professor of Mathematics in Columbia College, New-York, died in Lexington District, South Carolina, on the 15th of January. After completing his course of Theology, he was ordained a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... 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 control others, and to show boldness and fertility ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration of one Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded up a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all that could ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... latter thought it not proper to answer it, it was not to show that the question was insignificant, but to condemn the light and flippant manner in which a subject so important was taken up. Religion can answer the question, and with an ecstasy greater than that of the ancient Mathematician, exclaims, 'I have found it: I have found it.' The Bible is not only true, but TRUTH. It contains that which deserves this sublime emphasis. It settles the disputes of ages, and of philosophers, and makes known what is truth, and where it is to be found. It ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... The heavy-set mathematician smiled pleasantly as MacHeath and Griffin came into the gun chamber. "I just thought I'd come down and see how you were getting along," he said. His voice was a low tenor, with just a touch of Midwestern twang. "Sometimes the creative mind gets bogged down in the nth-order abstractions ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... he accepted the office and began to study books on surveying, furnished him by his employer. He was not a natural mathematician, and in working out his most difficult problems he sought the assistance of Mentor Graham, a famous schoolmaster in those days, who had previously assisted Lincoln in his studies. He soon became a competent surveyor, however, and was noted for the accurate way ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... it represents a lion, with his tail towards the east, and his head the west; and some others have thought it to be very much like a fox, and certainly 'tis as much like a lion as that in the zodiac, or as ursa major is like a bear." [99] This last remark of the old mathematician is "a hit, a very palpable hit," at those unpoetical people who catalogue the constellations under all sorts of living creatures' names, implying resemblances, and then "sap with solemn sneer" our myths of ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... electrical forces in the upper regions of the air. A third explanation is, that they are bodies thrown out by the volcanoes, which are known to exist in the moon, with such force as to bring them within the sphere of the earth's attraction. This notion was supported by the celebrated astronomer and mathematician La Place. He calculated that a body projected from the moon with the velocity of 7771 feet in the first second, would reach our earth in about two days and a half. But other astronomers are of opinion, that the known velocity of some meteors is too great to admit of the possibility of their having ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... says, 'he was certainly a prince indued with many Royall qualities, and of whom the Divine providence had taken a speciall care by preserving him after Worcester fight in the oak.' ... 'A star appeared at noon day at his birth; he was a great mathematician, chemist, and mechanick, and wrought oft in the laboratories himselfe; he had a natural mildnesse and command over his anger, which never transported him beyond an innocent puff and spitting, and was soon over, and yet commanded ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... ever held in existence by main human force against the elements, the arts of engineering, hydrostatics and kindred branches were of necessity much cultivated. It was reserved for the young mathematician to make them as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... your face homeward, and progress as a pig does into a steamer, by going the opposite way? Were you ever condemned to spin ropes of sand to all eternity, like Tregeagle the wrecker; or to extract the cube roots of a million or two of hopeless surds, like the mad mathematician; or last, and worst of all, to work the Nuisances Removal Act? Then you can enter, as a man and a brother, into the sorrows of Tom Thurnall, in the months ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... him to trial, for no jury would have convicted him. Ultimately, since Bedard refused to leave the prison, he was ejected at the point of the bayonet. The situation was full of humour. Bedard was an excellent mathematician, and was in the habit of whiling away the hours of his imprisonment by solving mathematical problems. When the guard came to turn him out, he was in the midst of a geometrical problem. 'At least,' he begged, 'let me finish my problem.' The request was granted; an hour later the problem was solved, ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... with his arms and badges, a step which must have destroyed many interesting bindings. Henry only lived three years to enjoy his purchase, but during that time he made many additions to it. Edward Wright, the mathematician, who died in 1615, was his librarian, and received a salary of thirty pounds a year. As Henry died intestate his library became the property of his father, and passed into the royal collection which was given to the ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... philosopher, Michelis, in his Haeckelogony: An Academic Protest against Haeckel's Anthropogeny (1875). In still more "academic" and somewhat mystic form the theory was advanced by a natural philosopher of the older Jena school—the mathematician and physicist, Carl Snell. But it received its chief support on the zoological side from Anton Dohrn, who maintained the anthropocentric ideas of Snell with particular ability. The Amphioxus, which modern science now almost unanimously regards as the real ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the matter so far as it is possible for it to do so. To explain what I mean, I may add that even in philosophy an attempt has been made to make use of a mystery. Pascal, for example, who was at once a pietist, a mathematician, and a philosopher, says in this threefold capacity: God is everywhere center and nowhere periphery. Malebranche has also the just remark: Liberty is a mystery. One could go a step further and maintain that in religions everything is mystery. For to impart truth, in the proper sense ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... thought more accurate than those of other men; and while, for others, all knowledge is often little more than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and death. A young mathematician may be excused for langour in studying curves to be described only with a pencil; but not in tracing those which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb may involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an obscure ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... might he ask what is to become of mathematics under similar circumstances, were they possible. I maintain that two and two the mathematician would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five. We are told that Mr. Ruskin has devoted his long life to art, and as a result—is "Slade Professor" ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... material world lies here. The world is only a thing that is; it is not. It is a thing that teaches, yet not even a thing—a show that shows, a teaching shadow. However useless the demonstration otherwise, philosophy does well in proving that matter is a non-entity. We work with it as the mathematician with an x. The reality is alone the Spiritual. "It is very well for physicists to speak of 'matter,' but for men generally to call this 'a material world' is an absurdity. Should we call it an x-world it would mean as much, viz., that we do not know what it is."[31] When shall we ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... in the wrong. It was about money matters, which in one way or another embittered the rest of Kepler's life, and it arose during his absence from Prague. On his return in September, 1601, Tycho presented him to the Emperor, who gave him the title of Imperial Mathematician, on condition of assisting Tycho in his calculations, the very thing Kepler was most anxious to be allowed to do: for nowhere else in the world was there such a collection of good observations sufficient for his ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... kind, grave, at times stern. Loving him dearly, we children yet observed a certain reverential distance. An outstanding mathematician and logician, he was guided principally by his intellect. But Mother was a queen of hearts, and taught us only through love. After her death, Father displayed more of his inner tenderness. I noticed then that his gaze often metamorphosed ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... consideration which, independently of every other, convinces me that there is no solid foundation in Mr. Hume's conclusion, is the following. When a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with it is to try it upon a simple case, and if it produce a false result, he is sure that there must be some mistake in the demonstration. Now to proceed in this way with what may be ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... happened also; but it belongs artistically in the "Immortal." On the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation of the "Immortal"—the taking in of a savant by a lot of forged manuscripts—has been falsified by changing the savant from a mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This borrowing from ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Poincare, the great French mathematician, held that our actual choice among these geometries is guided purely by convention, and that the effect of a change of choice would be simply to alter our expression of the physical laws of nature. By 'convention' ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... all too often to operate on an animal or "space-binding" plan of life. His aim and outlook are, however, essentially the same as those of the present writer. His method of approach will appeal especially to those who are wont to deal with affairs in the spirit of the mathematician and engineer. He is quite right in thinking that man has hitherto had little conception of his peculiar prerogatives and unlimited ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the assumption that men already possess religion and that they come to church to discuss it rather than to have it provided. They call men to be listeners rather than participants in their temples. Of course, one may find God through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician or the astronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think the thoughts of God after him!" Yet a service which places its chief emphasis upon the appeal to the will through instruction has declined from that realm of the absolutes where religion ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... literature as an art is not therefore to be a mathematician nor a political economist; still less to be a successful journalist, like Greeley, or a lecturer with a thousand annual invitations, like Gough. These careers have really no more to do with literature than has the stage or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... them, your Majesty," replied the Count. "Like yourself, I find it rather difficult to believe that this mysterious Mr Lennard, whoever he is, has been able to impose upon the whole British Cabinet, to say nothing of Lord Kitchener, who is about the best engineer and mathematician ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... dukes. Bonaparte promised the authorities of Mantua that their department should be one of the most extensive; impressed on them the necessity of promptly organising a local militia, and of putting in execution the plans of Mari, the mathematician, for the navigation of the Mincio from Mantua ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Martin Doboka, county surveyor and expert mathematician. He will measure for you land, water, or fog; and if your watch stops going, he ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... fifty years before Vesalius! Compare, too, this figure of the bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius.(24) Insatiate in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet, sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist, aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment in any one department was not for him! A passionate desire for a mastery of nature's secrets made him ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... devoted himself to mathematics. In his last moments, when he retained no further recollection of the friends who surrounded his bed, one of them, perhaps to make a philosophical experiment, thought proper to ask him the square of twelve: our dying mathematician instantly, and perhaps without knowing that he answered, replied, "One ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... relishing things on the table, and so gradually led the way to hot suppers and midnight symposia. Towards the end of his college-session, Carlyle was introduced to a club which gave him great satisfaction. The principal member was Robert Simson, the celebrated mathematician. Simson was a great humorist, and was particularly averse to the company of ladies. Matthew Stewart, afterwards Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh, was a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... optics, by the illustrious astronomer, Huyghens. He deduced from it the laws of reflection and refraction, and applied it to explain the double refraction of Iceland spar. The theory was espoused and defended by the celebrated mathematician, Euler. They were, however, opposed by Newton, whose authority at the time bore them down. Or shall we say it was authority merely? Not quite so. Newton's preponderance was in some degree due to the fact that, though Huyghens and Euler were right in the main, they ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... least. What I needed I asked for, and then listened attentively for the barbaric representative of "yes" or "no" in the Babel of sounds that followed, neglecting the flux of verbiage that engulfed it with the same lofty indifference which a mathematician professes toward infinitely small quantities. With a view to avoiding cross-purposes there is nothing like economy of speech. But how my tawny hosts could contrive to realize such a fortune of talk out of their very meagre capital of subject-matter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... are, because they cannot go beyond the information provided by their bodily senses. Man, on the contrary, gains infinitely more knowledge than his bodily senses can afford. By studying the relations of abstract points to abstract lines, he becomes a mathematician. Following up the many "hows" of chemistry, he talks about molecules, atoms, and ions as fluently as: if he had ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... records of his college life have been preserved, and, as he went to London, it is wonderful that the next ten years of his life remain a blank. He joined the Royal Society in 1760, but contributed nothing until 1766, when he published his first paper on "Factitious Airs." Cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. He lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was based on erroneous and absurd ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... process by means of which M. HAUeY forms his pupils, and there are a great number of them whose abilities would excite the pride of many a clear-sighted person. For instance, in addition to the before-mentioned LESUEUR, who is an excellent geographer and a good mathematician, might be quoted HUARD, a man of erudition and a correct printer; likewise CAILLAT, a capital performer on the violin, and a celebrated composer. For vocal and instrumental music, printing, and handicraft work, there might be noticed thirty or ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... armistice was broken, and Hippocrates and Epicydes undertook the government of the city. No course was left to the consul except to undertake a siege; but the skilful conduct of the defence, in which the Syracusan engineer Archimedes, celebrated as a learned mathematician, especially distinguished himself, compelled the Romans after besieging the city for eight months to convert the siege into a blockade by sea ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... as a mathematician and a physicist we are not here concerned. In it "we see," writes a scientific authority, "the strongest marks of a great original genius creating new ideas, and seizing upon, mastering, and pursuing further everything that was fresh and unfamiliar in his time. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Galileo died, the famous English mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, was born (1642-1727). He carried on the work of earlier astronomers by the application of higher mathematics, and proved that the force of attraction which we call gravitation was a universal one, and that the sun and the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say,—that God refers to our sensible experience to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... peaceful home like ours. Strange to say, he actually turned out to be all they had said, and more. He had studied hard at college and when reading for a profession; he was a linguist, a musician, he had literary tastes, and was well read in science, and above all he was a first-rate mathematician. Naturally, to my studious brother he came as an angel beautiful and bright, with no suggestion of the fiend in him; for not only was he a mathematician, but he was also an accomplished fencer and boxer. And so the two were soon fast friends, and worked ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... in the year 1792. Evincing considerable talents at a very early age, he received a careful private education under Mr. Rogers, a Scottish mathematician of distinguished merit; and afterwards was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, always famous as a nursery of mathematical and scientific prodigies! Here he pursued his studies with remarkable success, suffering no ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... favourite painters, and here he is wholly a joy. Of his works Florence has but few, since he was not a Florentine, nor did he work here, being engaged chiefly at Urbino, Ferrara, Arezzo, and Rome. His life ended sadly, for he became totally blind. In addition to his painting he was a mathematician of much repute. The Duke of Urbino here depicted is Federigo da Montefeltro, who ruled from 1444 to 1482, and in 1459 married as his second wife a daughter of Alessandro Sforza, of Pesaro, the wedding being the occasion of Piero's pictures. The duke stands out among the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... writing, and ciphering, the governors had selected the Dominie as the most fitting person that had offered for the employment, because he had, in the first place, written a work that nobody could understand upon the Greek particles; secondly, he had proved himself a great mathematician, having, it is said, squared the circle by algebraical false quantities, but would never show the operation for fear of losing the honour by treachery. He had also discovered as many errors in the demonstrations of ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in the University of Virginia were well attended. His lectures were delivered extempore, in language exactly expressing his thoughts. His illustrations were most apt. He taught "with the simplicity of a child, with the precision of a mathematician, and ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... too able a mathematician to commit these elementary blunders; he did not assume to account for rotation by inapplicable laws, but took for granted that the sun revolved upon its axis, and thence communicated a corresponding motion to the bodies thrown from its surface. But our author has sought to advance beyond his ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... medicine-bottles, all were classified in a way which would have done honor to the British Museum. This space of six feet square contained incalculable wealth; the doctor needed only to stretch out his hand without rising, to become at once a physician, a mathematician, an astronomer, a geographer, a botanist, or ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne |
