"Mathematician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... singular rigidity, even when, outside of the Institute and as private individuals, they fail to observe in their writings the proper rules imposed on every public body. The rod falls heavily on Jerome de Lalande, the mathematician and astronomer who continues the work of Montucla, publicly and in a humiliating way, the blow being given by his colleagues who are thus delegated for the purpose. "A member of the Institute," says the imperial note,[6239] "well known for his attainments, but now fallen into an infantile state, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... expert mathematician to keep track of all the different kinds of duikers, for there's the crowned duiker, the yellow-backed duiker, the red duiker, Jentink's duiker, Abbott's duiker, the Ituri red duiker, the black-faced duiker, Alexander's duiker, the Ruddy ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... even to become a second La Place after thirty years' study, if in five and thirty years the Lord descended from heaven, snatched up all his saints to meet him, and burned to ashes all the works of the earth? Then all the mathematician's work would have perished, and he would grieve over his unwisdom, in laying up store which could not stand the fire of the Lord. Clearly; if we are bound to act as though the end of all earthly concerns may come, "at ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Maddock, big, impudent, and pachydermous, it took Dugald Robertson, the minister's son, just half an hour's hard fighting to extract a promise of good behaviour. Dugald was in the main a thoughtful, peaceable boy, the most advanced pupil in the entrance class, and a great mathematician. At first he was inclined to despise the teacher, setting little store by her beautiful face and fascinating smile, for on the very first day he discovered her woful mathematical inadequacy. Arithmetic was her despair. With ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... age; a self-respect which was easily offended and which revolted at the slightest insignificant provocation; a passionate impetuosity in solving world problems; fits of melancholy alternated by equally wild fits of merriment—all this gave the young mathematician a character of extreme unsteadiness, of ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... were founded on the assumption that exceptional variations would only occur in single individuals, which is, indeed, often the case among those domesticated races on which Darwin especially studied the phenomena of variation. Darwin was no mathematician or physicist, and we are told in his biography that he regarded every tool-shop rule or optician's thermometer as an instrument of precision: so he appears to have regarded Fleeming Jenkin's demonstration as a ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... may not be a conjuror or a mathematician, gentlemen," cried Captain Truck, as he ladled out the beverage; "but he understands the philosophy of sweet and sour, strong and weak; and I will venture to praise his liquor without tasting it. Well, gentlemen, there are better-rigged ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... name of HIPPARCHUS of Bithynia (140 B.C.), the most illustrious astronomer of antiquity, who did much to raise astronomy to the position of a true science, and who has also left behind him ample evidence of his genius 'as a mathematician, an observer, and a theorist.' We are indebted to him for the earliest star catalogue, in which he included 1,081 stars. He discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes, and determined the motions of the Sun and Moon, and also the length of the year, with greater ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... study of music, of painting, of poetry and of languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent, to delimit ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... letter that he speaks of Braham and his singing, and jokes "on titles of honour," exemplifying the eleven gradations, by which Mr. C. Lamb rose in succession to be Baron, Marquis, Duke, Emperor Lamb, and finally Pope Innocent; and other lively matters fit to solace an English mathematician self-banished to China. The same year Mary Lamb describes her brother taking to water like a hungry otter—abstaining from all spirituous liquors, but with the most indifferent result, as he became full of cramps and rheumatism, and so cold internally that fire could not ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, and we employ them as the mathematician studies the circle by supposing it to be a polygon of a very great ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... have not disdained to labor honestly and usefully for a living, though at the same time aiming after higher things. Thales, the first of the seven sages; Solon, the second founder of Athens, and Hyperates, the mathematician, were all traders. Plato, called the Divine by reason of the excellence of his wisdom, defrayed his traveling expenses in Egypt by the profits derived from the oil which he sold during his journey. Spinoza maintained himself by polishing glasses while he pursued ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... 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 of our modern religious fanatics, persuaded himself ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... then a cry of admiration burst from the crowd, as St. George, the celebrated skater, executed some circle so perfect, that a mathematician could scarcely have found ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... learning but were themselves highly educated. Ptolemy Soter was an historian of no mean talent, and his son Philadelphus, as a pupil of the poet Philetas and the philosopher Strabo, was a man of great learning. Ptolemy III. was a mathematician, and Ptolemy Philopator, who had erected and dedicated a temple to Homer, was the writer of a tragedy. The efforts of the Ptolemies to bring the two nationalities, Hellenic and Egyptian, nearer to each other, to mould and weld them into one if possible, to mix ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... perpetual surprises, a microscopic sense of finish by her finesse, or delicacy of operation, that subtilitas naturae which Bacon notices. So we find him often in intimate relations with men of science, with Fra Luca Paccioli the mathematician, and the anatomist Marc Antonio della Torre. His observations and experiments fill thirteen volumes of manuscript; and those who can judge describe him as anticipating long before, by rapid intuition, the later ideas ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... by his contemporaries, Pope calls Arbuthnot 'as good a doctor as any man for one that is ill, and a better doctor for one that is well;' Swift said he had every virtue which could make a man amiable; Berkeley wrote of him as a great philosopher who was reckoned the first mathematician of the age and had the character 'of uncommon virtue and probity,' and Chesterfield, who declared that his knowledge and 'almost inexhaustible imagination' were at every one's service, added that 'charity, benevolence, and a love of mankind appeared unaffectedly in ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... theology and philosophy, whose original ideas and sayings marked her as "a character." Another woman who exercised a great influence upon him was Sarah Bradford, afterward married to his relative, Samuel Ripley. She was as thorough a Greek scholar as any person in America, a good mathematician, and a diligent student of science. Many a Harvard student has she coached in that Old Manse where she resided until her death (1867), and where the writer of this has often listened with admiration to her extraordinary conversation. At the same time nothing could have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... knowledge as a Licentiate of the Apothecaries' Company, London, his theory as a Mathematician, and his practice as a Working Optician, aided by Smee's Optometer, in the selection of Spectacles suitable to every derangement of vision, so as to preserve the sight to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... either Bacon or Hobbes, Rene Descartes, not only in his immortal 'Discours de la Methode' and elsewhere, went down to the foundations of scientific certainty, but, in his 'Principes de Philosophie,' indicated where the goal of physical science really lay. However, Descartes was an eminent mathematician, and it would seem that the bent of his mind led him to overestimate the value of deductive reasoning from general principles, as much as Bacon had underestimated it. The progress of physical science has been effected neither ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... interested especially, no doubt, in the new kind of ministration to which she was listening, she gave me her whole attention, often slightly nodding her assent, unconsciously to herself and unobserved by others. She married Professor John Farrar of Harvard, and [69] able mathematician, and one of the most genial and ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... his office under his lord was lucrative, yet he got no estate; but saith my author "peculiari poetis fato semper cum paupertate conflictatus est." So that it fared little better with him than with William Xilander the German (a most excellent linguist, antiquary, philosopher and mathematician), who was so poor, that (as Thuanus saith), he was thought "fami non famae scribere." 'Returning into England, he was robb'd by the rebels of what little he had; and dying for grief in great want, anno 1598, was honourably ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... that one of the special reasons for his journey from America was to see him, the Oxford mathematician sufficiently softened to ask the editor to sit down. Bok then broached ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... examining the various consequences drawn from them, and the heterodox opinions about them? Have you not taken them for granted in the whole course of your studies? Or, if you have looked now and then on the state of the proofs brought to maintain them, have you not done it as a mathematician looks over a demonstration formerly made—to refresh his memory, not to satisfy any doubt? If you have thus examined, it may appear marvelous to some that you have spent so much time in many parts of those studies which have reduced you to this hectic condition ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... exercise proportioned to our talents, and our faculties. The chace and the gaming table have each their dangers and difficulties, to excite and employ the mind. All games of contention animate our emulation, and give a species of party zeal. The mathematician is only to be amused with intricate problems, the lawyer and the casuist with cases that try their subtilty, and ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... there is no science that can upset the Source of all science! The greatest mathematician that lives did not institute mathematics—he only copies ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... individual man, if you strip him of all that is extraneous to himself, is the most wretched and contemptible creature on the face of the earth. The sciences advance. True. A few years of study puts a modern mathematician in possession of more than Newton knew, and leaves him at leisure to add new discoveries of his own. Agreed. But does this make him a Newton? Does it put him in possession of that range of intellect, that grasp of mind, from which the discoveries of ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... lines adjoining one another are practically in the same proportion to each other; that is to say, one 8 inches is 1.600 times the size of one 5 inches, and the 13-inch line is 1.625 the size of the 8-inch, and the 21-inch line being 1.615 times the 13-inch line, and so on. With the mathematician's love of accuracy, Mr. Schooling has worked out the exact proportion that should exist between a series of quantities for them to be in the same proportion to their neighbours, and in which any two added together would produce the next. There is only one proportion that ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... truly great men are spiritualists—even mystics. A materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way; but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an intellectual Antaeus—the moment his feet leave the sodden clay he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... this is right. I cannot be sure; and I cannot be sure, though I was educated to be a mathematician by a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... you say them, but that you mistake me. Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependance, but my dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been "more fool than knave." A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... three, 100 for four, and so on. It is unnecessary to observe, with how many inconveniences such a system would be attended when reduced to practice. This discovery of the binary series, which the mathematician, in all probability, considered only as a philosophical plaything, was communicated to Father Bouvet the Jesuit who, happening at that time to be engaged in decyphering the lines of Fo-shee, caught the idea and in ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... regie, which threaten to absorb the entire youth of Italy. At this moment there is a distressing dearth of housing accommodation all over the peninsula; in Rome alone, they say, apartments are needed for 10,000 practically homeless persons, and a mathematician may calculate the number of houses required to contain them. How shall they ever be built, if all the potential builders are loafing about in uniforms at the public ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... conclusion, however, was that the affair was, simply, X-traordinary and in-X-plicable. Even the town mathematician confessed that he could make nothing of so dark a problem. X, every. body knew, was an unknown quantity; but in this case (as he properly observed), there was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... believe, from a passage in Virgil [269], that it was little cultivated by the Romans; and it is certain, that in the reformation of the calendar, Julius Caesar was chiefly indebted to the scientific knowledge of (158) Sosigenes, a mathematician of Alexandria. The laws of the solar system were still but imperfectly known; the popular belief, that the sun moved round the earth, was universally maintained, and continued until the sixteenth century, when the contrary was proved by Copernicus. There existed ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and great-grandfather came from near Bridgeport in Connecticut about the end of the Revolution and settled in Stamford, Delaware County, New York. Captain Stephen Burroughs of Bridgeport, a mathematician and a man of note in his time, was Father's great uncle. Father used to say that his uncle Stephen could build a ship and sail it around the world. The family name is still common in and about Bridgeport. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... had been so carefully collected and recorded that he felt sure that the necessary information was included somewhere in the records. The problem of developing this law from the accumulated facts was therefore handed over to Mr. Carl G. Barth, who is a better mathematician than any of the rest of us, and we decided to investigate the problem in a new way, by graphically representing each element of the work through plotting curves, which should give us, as it were, a bird's-eye view of ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... anonymous mathematician has declared that in the British Isles the female population is seven times greater than the male; therefore, in these days is fulfilled the scriptural prophecy that seven women shall lay hold of one man and entreat to be called by his ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... average in one direction would contain about the same number of individuals as the class at the same distance from the average in the opposite direction. Taking into account the relative numbers in the several classes and the various degrees to which they depart from the average, the mathematician describes the whole phenomenon of variation in human stature by a concise formula which outlines the so-called "curve of error." From his study of a thousand men, he can tell how many there would be in the various classes if he had ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... absorption in a mathematical problem. Of course I attained no higher than the dregs of the subject; on that grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday's violent trope) have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin, and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... those little things that are thus related to something of real value that deserve attention. The mathematician is a stickler for little things. He insists that figures should be plainly made, and that 1 1 should never be allowed to equal 3. He is wholly in the right, because the slightest error in reading ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Ainsworth really the earliest mathematician of his district? Or, was he merely the first that made any figure in print as a correspondent of the mathematical periodicals of that day? This question is worthy of MR. WILKINSON's further inquiry; and probably some light may be thrown upon it by a careful ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... putative parent. His, too, was a kindly nature, and many a rising artist found his way to a larger recognition by Appleton's unobtrusive aid. He, like Longfellow, was a sincere Spiritualist. One of the most remarkable of this group of men was Professor Peirce, mathematician, of whose flights into the higher regions of the science of numbers and quantities many interesting things were told. He had written a book to show, if I remember right after so many years, that the square root of minus one was ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... less, said the first Mathematician. It is no more true of the geometer's space and the philosopher's matter than of the physiologist's functional power. Apply the axiom to the functional quantity of the feminine and masculine, and it will be seen which includes which, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the most eminent English mathematician of this century, was publicly denounced in church by Dean Cockburn, of York; and when George Eliot died a few weeks since, her lifeless remains were refused interment in Westminster Abbey, where so many inferior authors of the privileged sex ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the following letter to Tennyson in reference to ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... difficult for the Mahatma to descend to that. He half-closed his eyes in turn and frowned, as if hard put to it to simplify his thoughts sufficiently—something like a mathematician trying to explain himself ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... down end to end all the possible relations that forty-eight figures could be put into you'd need a lifetime to write them down. Why, just with an alphabet of twenty-four letters, Leibnitz the great mathematician, calculated that over six hundred septillions of easily pronounceable words, none over three syllables long, could be arranged. We have room enough to arrange any trifling little matter like seventy or eighty million ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... branches of geometry, but was perhaps particularly remarkable for his frequent and attentive inspection of mirrors. If you had only read this book, Aemilianus, and, instead of devoting yourself to the study of your fields and their dull clods, had studied the mathematician's slate and blackboard, believe me, although your face is hideous enough for a tragic mask of Thyestes, you would assuredly, in your desire for the acquisition of knowledge, look into the glass and sometimes leave your plough to marvel at the numberless furrows with ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Merzewan carried Kemerezzeman to the bath and clothing him in a merchant's habit, provided him with a geomantic tablet of gold, a set of astrological instruments and an astrolabe of silver, plated with gold. Then he said to him, 'Go, O my lord, stand before the King's palace and cry out, "I am the mathematician, I am the scribe, I am he that knows the Sought and the Seeker, I am the skilled physician, I am the accomplished astrologer. Where then is he that seeketh?" When the King hears this, he will send ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... Anician 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 ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... companionship. Darrell was a man of business, a most capable officer, a good Mess Secretary, and very easy to get on with. Leary was a dark-haired Irishman, who had originated in the County Limerick. He was a good mathematician, but in conversation was apt to be long-winded, and had a wonderful capacity for making a simple matter appear complex. He had been, by turns, a civil engineer and an actor, and had a fine singing voice. As an officer he was infinitely laborious and conscientious, but with a queer disconcerting ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... had been three years at college, his uncle hinted that it was time to think of a profession, and suggested that as he was a first-rate mathematician, and had been fond of mechanics from his childhood, he should turn an engineer. Ned would probably have agreed to this cheerfully, had not a thirst for adventure been created by the stirring accounts which had begun to arrive at this time from the recently-discovered gold-fields ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... much free expression; but beauty not yet. No abstract expression such as Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia, or Peano's Formulaire, no matter how rigorous and complete, is a work of art. We admire the mathematician's formula for its simplicity and adequacy; we take delight in its clarity and scope, in the ease with which it enables the mind to master a thousand more special truths, but we do not find it beautiful. Equally removed from the sphere of the beautiful ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... never proposed to himself any thing vague or indefinite. His constant object was the explanation of the great phenomena of nature, according to the inflexible principles of mathematical analysis. No philosopher, no mathematician, could have maintained himself more cautiously on his guard against a propensity to hasty speculation. No person dreaded more the scientific errors which the imagination gives birth to, when it ceases to remain within ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... treated of the quadrature of the circle and of the parabola; he wrote on Conoids and Spheroids, and on the spiral that bears his name, the genesis of which was suggested to him by his friend Conon the Alexandrian. As a mathematician, Europe produced no equal to him for nearly two thousand years. In physical science he laid the foundation of hydrostatics; invented a method for the determination of specific gravities; discussed the equilibrium of floating bodies; discovered the true theory ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Dr. Wallis the 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 enjoy the forbidden Prayer-Book; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Dr. Bowditch, the famous mathematician, a man too dignified to smile on ordinary occasions, was caught in the crowd that was waiting for Lafayette. He walked up a flight of steps, that he might with proper dignity let the crowd pass. At the sight of the famous ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... bringing mankind out of pristine savagery into a state in which more advanced modes of belief became possible. His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes, not only every important name in the scientific movement, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the biologist, and in the aesthetic from Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of society.[20] Above all, he has the most profound ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... there to give them variety? No—Nature is a subtle chemist, and her workshop, depend on it, is stored with delicate elixirs, volatile spirits, and precious fires of genius. Certain of these are kneaded with the clay of the poet, others with the clay of the painter, the astronomer, the mathematician, the legislator, the soldier. Raffaelle had in him some of 'the stuff that dreams are made of.' Never tell me that that same stuff, differently treated, would equally well have furnished forth an Archimedes or ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 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
... types of astronomers—from the stargazer who merely watches the heavens, to the abstract mathematician who merely works at his desk; it has, consequently, been necessary in the case of some lives to adopt a very different treatment from that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... technique becomes elaborate and requires time and instruction for its mastery. The advance which mathematics has made within a brief historical time is strikingly illustrated by the words with which the celebrated mathematician, Sir Henry Savile, who died in 1662, closed his career as a professor ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... imaginative and reflective organs are very large; those of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or you may make a sojor of him, though worse men than him's good enough for that—but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable mathematician. My opinion, Colonel, is that young scapegrace will give you a deal of trouble; or would, only you are so absurdly proud of him, and you think everything he does is perfection. He'll spend your money for you; he'll do as little work as need be. He'll get into scrapes ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... tittle. Supposing that a weary man of science leaves his laboratory in the evening, and wends his way homeward, the very thought of the game of whist which awaits him is a kind of recuperative agency. Whist is the true recreation of the man of science; and the astronomer or mathematician or biologist goes calmly to rest with his mind at ease after he has enjoyed his rubber. The most industrious of living novelists and the most prolific of all modern writers was asked—so he tells us in his autobiography—"How is it that your thirtieth book is fresher than ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... ether was advocated, and successfully applied to various phenomena of 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 ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the canon, therefore, this curve should be beautiful; and it is acknowledged to be so in the examples given by the bending osier and the waving grain,—also by the few who have seen full drawings of all the forms. And the mathematician finds in it a new beauty, from its marvellous correspondence with the motions of a pendulum,—the algebraic expression of the two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... with him in his closet, I went to my Lord's: the King and the Duke being gone to chapel, it being a collar day, Candlemas-day; where I staid with him until towards noon, there being Jonas Moore [Jonas Moore, a most celebrated mathematician, knighted by Charles II., and made Surveyor of the Ordnance. Ob. 1679.] talking about some mathematical businesses. With Mr. Coventry down to his chamber, where he did tell me how he do make himself an interest by doing business ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... to have security in his own hands for their fidelity in the performance of their work, and for their remaining at their posts until their work was done. There was one gentleman in particular, a Scotch mathematician and engineer, who had been educated at the University of Aberdeen, that complained of the treatment which he received in a full and formal protest, which he addressed to Peter in writing, and which is still on record. He makes out a very strong case in respect to the ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... A mathematician, Mr. Wright, has been writing on the geometry of bee-cells in the United States in consequence of my book; but I can hardly understand his paper. (75/1. Chauncey Wright, "Remarks on the Architecture of Bees" ("Amer. Acad. Proc." IV., 1857-60, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the most possible out of ourselves and our opportunities. Perhaps ninety-nine of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be content to remain helpless objects of charity for life. If it ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Tagalog, and Zambal languages. Fray Carlos de Jesus, son of Nicolas Leconte, was born of Flemish parents. After various fortunes he went to Madrid, and although a brilliant life was offered him, for he was a scholar and fine mathematician, he took the Recollect habit in the convent of that city, January 2, 1648, being already at middle age. He also accompanied Fray Jacinto de San Fulgencio to the Philippines in 1651. He worked in Calamianes and Caraga, where his military genius as well as his missionary traits shone out. He recalls ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... conform her taste to his: for this reason I should therefore, in female education, cultivate the general powers of the mind, rather than any particular faculty. I do not desire to make my daughter merely a musician, a painter, or a poet; I do not desire to make her merely a botanist, a mathematician, or a chemist; but I wish to give her early the habit of industry and attention, the love of knowledge, and the power of reasoning: these will enable her to attend to excellence in any pursuit to which she may direct her talents. You will observe, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... fountain, were gathered the squire, Mrs. Darcy, Madame de Netteville, and two unknown men. One of them was introduced to Elsmere as Mr. Spooner, and recognised by him as a Fellow of the Royal Society, a famous mathematician, sceptic, bon vivant, and sayer of good things. The other was a young Liberal Catholic, the author of a remarkable collection of essays on mediaeval subjects in which the squire, treating the man's opinions of course as of no account, had instantly recognised the note of the true ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ranks higher, and no Roman ever wrote purer Latin than he. But his historical works, however great their merit, but feebly represent his transcendent genius—the most august name of antiquity. He was mathematician, architect, poet, philologist, orator, jurist, general, statesman—imperator. In eloquence he was only second to Cicero. The great value of his history is in the sketches of the productions, the manners, the customs, and the political state of Gaul, Britain, and Germany. His observations on ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... whatever failed to fulfil the strictest requirements of logic, a mathematical training, during the past two centuries, encouraged the belief that many things, which a rigid inquiry would reject as fallacious, must yet be accepted because they work in what the mathematician calls "practice." By this means, a timid, compromising spirit, or else a sacerdotal belief in mysteries not intelligible to the profane, has been bred where reason alone should have ruled. All this it is now time to sweep away; let those who wish to penetrate ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... after agreeing that Miss Theorem the mathematician was charming; Miss Quartz the geologist lovely; that Miss Affectation was very piquante, and Mrs. Youngwidow exceedingly fine-looking in her mourning; after having amicably interchanged our ideas on these topics, we came to discuss the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... allegory, or, rather, an exercise in arithmetic or a theme of astrology. Dante, who was a good doctor of Bologna and had many moons in his head, under his pointed cap—Dante believed in the virtue of numbers. That inflamed mathematician dreamed of figures, and his Beatrice is the flower of arithmetic, that ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... intelligence is obvious; and in this way it participates in the kernel of 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 ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... decision there was no appeal, and no other dissent than what was expressed by a look or a low murmur. But I perceived the corpulent gentleman and the wan mathematician slily exchange their dishes, by which they both seemed to consider themselves gainers. The dish allotted to me, being of a middling character, I ate of it without repining; though, from the savoury fumes of my right-hand neighbour's plate, I could not help ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... perusal of them. What will the little learner gain, if the teacher follows the book in this instance? 'Where is the skin of the apple? On its surface.'' This is in the lesson for 'developing the idea' of surface. When, by and by, the young mathematician gets the true idea of a surface, as extension in two dimensions only, hence, without thickness, then will follow this surprising result, that the whole thickness of the apple-skin is on—outside—the apple's surface, and hence, is nowhere: a singular converse of the teaching ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... satisfied that the ill-conducted hero was a German and not an English officer, he passed the play without studying its moral tendencies. Even if he had undertaken that study, there is no more reason to suppose that he is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a competent mathematician. But truly it does not matter whether he is a moralist or not. Let nobody dream for a moment that what is wrong with the Censorship is the shortcoming of the gentleman who happens at any moment ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... of science, a mathematician, and a classical scholar, Mr. Froude possessed the most fascinating manners imaginable. His wife, the daughter of an old-world Devonshire notable who once owned the borough of Dartmouth, returning two members ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... published Johnson's Dictionary, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Cook's Voyages, etc. He was great-grandfather of the mathematician William Spottiswoode (1825-1883). ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Juan, "in that remote Orbajosa, where, by the way, you have some land that you might take a look at now, life passes with the tranquillity and the sweetness of an idyl. What patriarchal customs! What noble simplicity! What rural and Virgilian peace! If, instead of being a mathematician, you were a Latinist, you would repeat, as you enter it, the ergo tua rura manebunt. What an admirable place in which to commune with one's own soul and to prepare one's self for good works. There all is kindness ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... don't even specialize in any certain kind of work. One year they'll be fascinated by sub-nucleonics, the next by horse racing. Very erratic. Can't keep attention on any one thing. Heard of one once who engaged in fishing and alcohol drinking. Brilliant mathematician, too. But he'd only take a call once every ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... 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 ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... Macaulay, "that he was induced to stoop from speculation to practice. He was half ashamed of those inventions which were the wonder of hostile nations, and always spoke of them slightingly, as mere amusements, as trifles in which a mathematician might be suffered to relax his mind after intense application to the higher parts ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... 1863, a book was written by Mrs. de Morgan, the wife of the well-known mathematician Professor de Morgan, entitled "From Matter to Spirit." There is a sympathetic preface by the husband. The book is still well worth reading, for it is a question whether anyone has shown greater brain power in treating the subject. In it the prophecy is made that as the movement ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... two Hassler boys, 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 ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... 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. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... young Holsten, who was to be called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... such a catastrophe may appear too wildly improbable for belief, yet it was not the improbability of a world's blowing up that led to a temporary abandonment of Olbers's bold theory. The great French mathematician Lagrange investigated the explosive force "which would be necessary to detach a fragment of matter from a planet revolving at a given distance from the sun," and published the results in the Connaissance des ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... American colleges during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the wave of enthusiasm which attended this introduction was unfortunately not sufficiently tempered by emphasis on good teaching and breadth of knowledge, especially as regards applications. In fact, the leading mathematician in America during the early part of this period was glaringly weak along these lines. By means of his bountiful enthusiasm he was able to do a large amount of good for the selected band of gifted students who attended ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... by a sketch of his own life since he first dealt in books. This takes him twenty-six years back. It 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 had set himself ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... ordinary science there are complex questions which defy the acumen of the philosopher; so in polemical science there may be questions which present the same difficulties and complications. But as the first are daily yielding before the persevering attacks of the mathematician, so I doubt not polemical science will soon overcome the ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... of the young men who have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished genius as Lieutenant T.M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of those men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of letters and the gift of politics; he was a mathematician, an economist, a barrister, and a philosopher; he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar; as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze of adoration as a ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... less of rash conjecture in the supposition. In fine, it must be felt by every one who reads the account of this speculation of Laplace, that the only evidence which produces the least effect upon his mind, is the corroboration which it receives from the calculations of the mathematician—a species of proof which Mr Mill himself would not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... as his professions went.. I saw no reason to refuse his services, and he was accordingly engaged at $300 per annum, to rank second to William L. Farquhar. Farquhar was a capital navigator and excellent mathematician; was ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the predicate," claimed by Sir William Hamilton. Of writers upon it may be mentioned Professor De Morgan, W. Stanley Jevons, and especially Professor George Boole of Belfast. The latter, one of the subtlest thinkers of this age, and eminent as a mathematician, succeeded in making an ultimate analysis of the laws of thinking, and in giving them a symbolic notation, by which not only the truth of a simple proposition but the relative degree of truth in complex ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... defending his philosophical ideas; his first famous work, "Discours de la Methode," published in Leyden in 1637; published "Meditations of Philosophy" in 1641; a treatise on the passion of love in 1649; other works published after his death; famous as a mathematician as well as philosopher, his geometry being still standard ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... some of it," I said off-handedly, as if it were no affair of mine, "and it looked to me like the sort of thing a mathematician would see if he ever got ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... Valenciennes and how we breakfasted with two odd characters to come together in one, an Astronomer and a Soldier, viz., Sir Thomas Brisbane, who enlivens his quarters wherever he goes by erecting an observatory immediately, and studying hard as any Cambridge mathematician every hour that he is not on military duty. His officers seem to have partaken in some degree of the spirit of their General, and to have made use of their position at Valenciennes to make themselves perfectly acquainted ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... cannot be idle. There are few intellectual accomplishments which he does not possess, and possess in a very high degree. He speaks French (and, we believe, several other modern languages) fluently: is a capital mathematician, and obtained an introduction to the celebrated Carnot in this latter character, when the conversation turned on squaring the circle, and not on the propriety of confining France within the natural boundary of the Rhine. Mr. Brougham is, in fact, a striking instance ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 496 - Vol. 17, No. 496, June 27, 1831 • Various
... below him the dusty atmosphere of the actual world, why should he not attain to ideas in their purity, uncolored by his own individuality? But we must in justice remember that the poet cannot, in the same degree as the mathematician, present his ideals nakedly. They are, like the Phidian statues of the Fates, inseparable from their filmy veiling. Beauty seems to be differentiated from the other Platonic ideas by precisely this attribute, that it must be embodied. What else is the meaning ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 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 poem ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the King's boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the Janissaries. They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... public usefulness, even the government of Oriental races; the list of the known qualified would be exhausted, perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must; it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client's situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter in a novel, from the hour in which ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... explodes at a touch. He is uncertain and therefore unsafe. His best results are conjured forth, but no man has yet conjured forth a Nation—it is all slow, patient, painstaking work along mathematical lines. Washington was a mathematician and therefore not a genius. We call him a great man, but his greatness was of that sort in which we all can share; his virtues were of a kind that, in degree, we too may possess. Any man who succeeds in a legitimate business works with the same tools ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... people; but at all events they were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me that she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and could not have read ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... far as we know them, and to accept new discoveries, new methods, and new ways of applying them, as they come to us. And so, in the study of ourselves, let us throw aside traditions; let us forget the mountebanks and charlatans of the past; let us not wait for the final work of the mathematician; but, with plain common sense, let us apply such knowledge as we have at hand. This knowledge should be the result of careful observation, of a careful and prolonged study of all that science has discovered in regard to man, his origin, his development, his history, his body, and his ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... law, during an action there is a tradition that the safest place for a sailor, and where he is least likely to be hit, is the hole through which a cannon-ball or shell has crashed into the ship. Possibly, being a mathematician, Mr Morris may have calculated the possibilities against the elephant that had marched through that piece of fence coming back through it again. And so it was that as the Doctor's grounds were clear, the enemy having departed, he followed ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... general education. All mathematics above the standard of the office boy should be a special subject, like dynamics or hydrostatics. They are useless to the ordinary man. If you mention the utility of a mathematician like Isaac Newton, don't forget that it was his pre-eminently anti-mathematical gift for drawing conclusions from analogy which made him what he was. And Euclid—that frowsy anachronism! One might as well teach Latin by the system of Donatus. Surely ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... composition, and in all the lighter and more graceful requirements of a classical examination, Julian had an undoubted superiority, but Owen was his equal, if not his master, in the power of unravelling intricacies and understanding logic; and, besides this, Owen was a better mathematician, and, although classics had considerable preponderance, yet one mathematical paper always formed part of the Clerkland examination. Kennedy who, if he had properly employed his time, would have been no mean rival ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of a mathematician," said Mr. Fraser, with some irritation; "it is nothing but a trick, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... mathematician. His literary taste was extremely cold: he was not worthy of reading Richardson. The volumes, if he ever read them, must have fallen from his hands. The delicate and subtle turnings, those folds of the human heart, which require so nice a touch, was a problem which the mathematician could ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... [Instruments] abacus, logometer^, slide rule, slipstick [Coll.], tallies, Napier's bones, calculating machine, difference engine, suan- pan^; adding machine; cash register; electronic calculator, calculator, computer; [people who calculate] arithmetician, calculator, abacist^, algebraist, mathematician; statistician, geometer; programmer; accountant, auditor. V. number, count, tally, tell; call over, run over; take an account of, enumerate, muster, poll, recite, recapitulate; sum; sum up, cast up; tell off, score, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... body, it is reasonable to suppose, that at that time, he gave him all the mental powers needed for all purposes during the life of his race, and with that perfection in the physical, it is supposable he approached very nearly to intellectual perfection. He was a mathematician, not by collegiate process, but by native ability. He did not have to take a course in a university to study chemistry, because of the fact that he was a chemist when he was born. Possibly he could speak or understand ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... man maintained the fixed opinion that, at a certain stage in the history of the solar system, the sun's radiation had suffered diminution, the glacial epoch being a consequence of this solar chill. The celebrated French mathematician Poisson had another theory. Astronomers have shown that the solar system moves through space, and 'the temperature of space' is a familiar expression with scientific men. It was considered probable by Poisson that our system, during its motion, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Italians whom Holbach befriended were Paulo Frizi, the mathematician; Dr. Gatti; Pincini, the musician; and Mme. Riccoboni, ex-actress and novelist; whose lively correspondence with Garrick whom she met at Holbach's sheds much light on the social relations of ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... is thrown on the peculiar ways of the wind, now being considered, by Professor Langley in the special researches of his to which reference has already been made. This eminent observer and mathematician, suspecting that the old-fashioned instruments, which only told what the wind had been doing every hour, or at best every minute, gave but a most imperfect record, constructed delicate gauges, which would respond to every impulse and give readings ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... country, 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 potent against a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... artist, Major George Washington Whistler, was a graduate of West Point, and a member of the United States Corps of Engineers. He was an active, practical and useful man—a skilful draftsman and mathematician, and a man of affairs who could undertake a difficult task and carry ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Crystallographer Development engineer Doctor of medicine Electrical engineer Electronic engineer Experimental physicist Flight engineer Gyroscopics specialist Hydraulic engineer Information theory analyst Inorganic chemist Logical designer Magnetic device engineer Mathematician Mechanical applications engineer Mechanical engineer Mechanisms specialist Medical electronic engineer Metallurgical engineer Methods engineer Nuclear physicist Oceanographer Organic chemist Physical chemist Pneumatic engineer Process engineer Production engineer ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... in life afflicted with a wife and two children. My former professor of mathematics lived at a short distance from the house of my college friend, and I promised myself the pleasure of a visit to this worthy mathematician before indulging my appetite for the dainties of friendship. I accordingly made my way to the heart of a study, where everything was covered with a dust which bore witness to the lofty abstraction of the scholar. But a surprise was ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... is a law of the demons that they must get out at the same place where they sneaked in. This is a very suggestive expression. If a mathematician makes a mistake in the solution of a problem his only chance to get out of the difficulty lies just at the point where the mistake was made. He must remain in perplexity until he finds the mistake and corrects it. This law holds good in all our ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... Miss Berry's met Mrs. Somerville, the great mathematician. I had been reading in the morning Sedgwick's sermon on education, in which he talks of Whewell, Airy, and Mrs. Somerville, mentioning her as one of the great luminaries of the present day. The subject of astronomy is so sublime ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... the reign of Hiero II. that Archimedes, a native of Syracuse, and a supposed distant relation of the king, made the scientific discoveries and inventions that have secured for him the honor of being the most celebrated mathematician of antiquity. He was equally skilled in astronomy, geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics, and optics. His discovery of the principle of specific gravity is related in the following well-known story: Hiero, suspecting that ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... communicated to their understandings in the shape of an increase of knowledge, or it must subdue and overawe them by subjecting their wills. Admiration to be solid and lasting must be founded on proofs from which we have no means of escaping; it is neither a slight nor a voluntary gift. A mathematician who solves a profound problem, a poet who creates an image of beauty in the mind that was not there before, imparts knowledge and power to others, in which his greatness and his fame consists, and on which it reposes. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt |
