"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mean the scenes in the circle. For ourself, we know that when the hoop, composed of jets of gas, is let down, the curtain drawn up for the convenience of the half-price on their ejectment from the ring, the orange-peel cleared away, and the sawdust shaken, with mathematical precision, into a complete circle, we feel as much enlivened as the youngest child present; and actually join in the laugh which follows the clown's shrill shout of 'Here we are!' just for old acquaintance' sake. Nor can we ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... nation. They have not, perhaps, so frequently as others, that cool, sound judgment in matters of speculation, which can fit them for unravelling with success the perplexities of metaphysics; but their unparalleled success in mathematical pursuits is the best possible proof of the accuracy and quickness of their reasoning powers, when confined within due bounds. We do not refer to the astonishing efforts of such men as d'Alembert or La Place, but to the general diffusion of mathematical knowledge ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife, because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded themselves everywhere, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... we now possess of the form and dimensions of this globe of earth and water which we inhabit, has been entirely owing to the superior skill of the moderns in the mathematical sciences, as applicable to the practice of navigation, and to the observation and calculation of the motions of the heavenly bodies, for the ascertainment of latitudes and longitudes. It would require more space than can be conveniently devoted on the present ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... to maintain the purity of the service. But several examiners had to be executed and others banished beyond the Wall before matters were placed on a satisfactory basis. He also adopted the astronomical system in force in Europe, and he appointed the priest Adam Schaal head of the Mathematical Board at Pekin. But his most important work was the institution of the Grand Council, which still exists, and which is the supreme power under the emperor in the country. It is composed of only ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... mirror numbers was just opening up; certainly not because a few sensational journalists were toying with dead-end notions. For that matter the newsplastics weren't either and quickly went back to the regular mathematical reportage they ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... was partial information, it is true, upon certain general facts pertaining to longevity or to mortality laws, under certain conditions, but nothing that could give substantial data upon which to base mathematical calculations for the establishment of a science. Under those conditions, rates of premium were fixed for insurance at the different ages which the experience of many years has shown to be very much higher than is required to meet ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... Method, and—except among a few of the most advanced thinkers—as the final word of wisdom in regard to the manner of establishing definite and exact knowledge. The Deductive, often called the a priori Method—in which term the Anticipative or Hypothetical and the true Deductive Method, seen in Mathematical investigations, are not sufficiently discriminated—is, on the other hand, almost everywhere denounced as essentially false, the source of all error; and we are assured that the attempt to work it was the fault ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... were attending school, suppose the teacher had given you a mathematical problem to solve, and had said, 'You will find the rule by which this example can be worked on page 105, and the correct answer is 18.' You would have looked up the rule and started to work the example. If when you were done the answer you got ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He understands at last that they ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... them as nearly upright as they can, with the common carpenters' instruments; but they are not exact. To set a post of any kind, with great precision, perpendicular to the horizon, would require very expensive mathematical instruments, and very laborious and nice observations. Then, again, if the clock had been exact, and the post perfectly upright, Jonas could not have marked the place of the shadow exactly. The shadow has not an exact and well-defined edge; and ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... cold or meaningless,—an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life. But to the thinker himself these phrases stand for profound realities. It may be that words which have to other ears the dryness of a mathematical formula are to him the expression of moral purpose and sacred trust. Such an one may say: "I do not recognize a personal God, I do not know that I shall have any personal immortality; but I believe in the moral order ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... with that mathematical exactitude dear to his scientific mind. She puzzled this honest man, who fell deeper and deeper in love with her. Whenever they met, and their first tender effusions were over, the lovers exchanged ideas, and always on the ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... necessarily brought into requisition in solving astronomical and geometrical problems. We ourselves are debtors to the ancient Egyptians for much of our mathematical knowledge, which has come to us from the banks of the Nile, through ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of a Kala added, make what is known as a Muhurta. Thirty Muhurtas make up one day and night. Thirty days and nights are called a month, and twelve months are called a year. Persons conversant with mathematical science say that a year is made up of two ayanas (dependent on sun's motion), viz., the northern and the southern. The sun makes the day and the night for the world of man. The night is for the sleep of all living creatures, and the day is for the doing of action. A month of human beings ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... appears to indicate hopeless indifference to being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem, however, although not cut with mathematical precision. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... baronet; "and Dutton will be one of the happiest fellows in Devonshire. I wish we could have Mrs. Dutton and Milly, and then the table would look what my poor brother James—St. James I used to call him—what the Rev. James Wychecombe was accustomed to term, mathematical. He said a table should have all its sides and angles duly filled. James was a most agreeable companion, Sir Gervaise, and, in divinity, he would not have turned his back on one of the apostles, I do ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain, being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem—mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I'd say that a hundred million cubic feet would be the ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... noiselessly sobbing, shaking all over, and stifling every sound for fear she should be ejected from the court. The document she had handed up was that letter Mitya had written at the "Metropolis" tavern, which Ivan had spoken of as a "mathematical proof." Alas! its mathematical conclusiveness was recognized, and had it not been for that letter, Mitya might have escaped his doom or, at least, that doom would have been less terrible. It was, I repeat, difficult to notice every detail. What followed ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the descendants of Shem, in every country, and see they belong to the white race, which none will pretend to deny—that they were so before, and after the flood, and have continued to be so to the present time, is unquestionably true. We know then, on Biblical authority, with mathematical certainty, that they are not negroes, either before, at, nor since ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... the native gentleman boisterous and vulgar. I never saw Karlee laugh; and if I had happened to snatch him from sudden death by fire or water, I think he would have acknowledged the obligation with precisely the same mathematical salaam, or at most the same sententious obsequiousness, with which he accepted a buksheesh of a half-rupee; and yet in both good-humor and gratitude he was as cheerful and as worthy as the most giddy and gushing of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... completely both those tongues if they had "live" teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life. There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from "exercises" to practice. There is a pretence of studying philosophy based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can read comfortably, and a certain amount of history. The Modern History School at Oxford, for example, is the queerest collection ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of the first volume of 'The Laws of Fesole' I have laid down the mathematical principles of rightly drawing maps;—principles which for many reasons it is well that my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... grace at breakfast that when he was a boy he used to take a great deal of interest in natural history, and that he presumed his pupils would feel much the same as he did, and would have no objection to setting aside their classical and mathematical studies for the morning and watching the entrance of the procession when it entered ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... dining-room and general living-room. There are certainly distinct advantages in a climate so settled that periods of daily sunshine or of daily rain really form part of the calendar, and can be predicted with mathematical certainty. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... asserted himself. He seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides, he was very good-looking, of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... distasteful to the young girl, it was not until she reached her twentieth year that she was allowed to withdraw from society. In welcome seclusion, she devoted herself to the study of mathematics, and published several mathematical works whose value is still recognized. In 1752 her father fell ill, and, by Pope Benedict XIV., Gaetana was appointed to occupy his professorial chair, which she did with distinction. At her father's death, two years later, she withdrew from this active career; and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... at the heels. The old doctor declared that this man must have been instantly killed by a bullet. The size of the circular wound, the absence of blood around its edge, and the blackened and burnt state of the flesh demonstrated this fact with almost mathematical precision. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... the interest with which these bold travellers gazed on the Starry Queen, the final object of their daring journey. She was now insensibly approaching the zenith, the mathematical point which she was to reach four days later. They presented their telescopes, but her mountains, plains, craters and general characteristics hardly came out a particle more sharply than if they had been viewed from the Earth. Still, her light, unobstructed by air or ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you waited awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt something in me that cried, 'Ha! ha!' to the sound ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the spirit of the place, let him yield to such fancies, and follow them wherever they lead. For, though error on this side is very rare among us in these days, it is possible to check these finer thoughts by mathematical accuracies, so as materially to impair the imaginative faculty. I shall be able to explain this better after we have traced the actual operation of Turner's mind ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... to be done over, and time sacrificed, if this is not attended to. The adjustment of the head to the size of the plate (as seen from the margin of the mat), is not to be taught: everyone must bring himself, by scrutinizing practice, to mathematical accuracy; for something will be discovered in every face which can be ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... is spread on the table, and upon it are a number of the scientific instruments common to astrology and to the uses of astronomers like Kratzer, in whose portrait at the Louvre they are also to be seen. On the lower shelf are mathematical and musical instruments and books. The two latter are opened to display their text conspicuously. Near the man at our left, and kept open by a T-square, is the Arithmetic which Peter Apian, astronomer and globe-maker, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... mileage.[669] To the objection that the mileage formula was inapplicable in this instance because of the disparity of the revenue-producing capacity between the lines in and out of the State, the Court answered that mathematical exactitude in making an apportionment had never been a constitutional requirement. "Wherever," it explained, "the State's taxing authorities have been held to have intruded upon the protected domain of interstate commerce in their use of a mileage formula, the special circumstances ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats,—all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... on the physical than on the mathematical facts of Astronomy the author has made every page of the book deeply interesting to the student and the general reader. The treatment of the planets and other heavenly bodies and of the law of universal gravitation is unusually full, clear, and illuminative. ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... He was determined to forge ahead in business, get an education, and become versed in the gentler branches of social life at the earliest possible moment. His chief trouble was that the days contained only twenty-four hours. Even his dreams were a jumble of plows and personal pronouns, of mathematical ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... it was quite unnecessary to institute an inquisition into the religious opinions of people whose business was merely to teach secular knowledge, and that it was absurd to imagine that any man of learning would disgrace and ruin himself by preaching infidelity from the Greek chair or the Mathematical chair. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wonder. They were confident that no Bracy had ever been a mathematician; for an uncle of theirs, now a rector in Shropshire and once of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where for reasons best known to himself he had sought honours in the Mathematical Tripos and narrowly missed the Wooden Spoon, had clearly no claim to the title. Whence in the world did the boy derive this gift? "His mother—" Miss Bracy began, and broke off as a puff of smoke shot ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her argument from a dislike to the present order of things, or from a wish to ingratiate himself in her favour. The argument of the Garde du Corps was espoused, but soberly, by one of the passengers who was a mathematical professor at one of the Lyceums; he was not by any means an Ultra, but he supported the Bourbons, with moderate, gentlemanly and I therefore believe sincere attachment. This professor seemed a well informed sort of man; he told me that he was acquainted with ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... it will be Captain Mason before long," said Warner. "Lots of boys under twenty are captains and some are colonels. Your right to promotion is a mathematical certainty, and I can demonstrate it with numerous formulae from the little algebra which even now is in the inside pocket of ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the true mode of investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, assumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ingenious ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he read ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... went to a forester for instruction, but did not remain long. Meantime he had gained some mathematical knowledge, and devoted himself to surveying. By this and similar work he earned a living, until, at the end of seven years, he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main to learn the rudiments of building. There Fate brought him into contact with the pedagogue ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or individual variability, as it was formerly called, is now carried on chiefly by mathematical methods. It is not my purpose to go into details, as it would require a separate course of lectures. I shall consider the limits between fluctuation and mutation only, and attempt to set forth an adequate idea of the principles of the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... of remarkable progress in the field of physics. It is not surprising then that theorists in the field of medicine, noting the truths discovered by conceiving of nature as a great machine functioning according to laws that could be expressed in mathematical terms, should have attempted to explain the human ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... in such soporific vapors had the effect of those mathematical devices whereby restless people cipher themselves to sleep. His languid head fell to his breast. In another moment, he drooped half-lengthwise upon a chest, his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... love," he wrote to Flamsteed, "to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things, or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them, when I ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the conservatories for months. John said a word or two on the cost of keeping them up, and the need of prudence, with a view to providing for Arthur's children. It was the right chord. She looked up, puzzled: her mathematical knowledge had never descended ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up for astrological labors, and provided with celestial charts, with globes, telescopes, quadrants, and other mathematical instruments. Seven colossal figures, representing the planets, each with a transparent star of different color on its head, stand in a semicircle in the background, so that Mars and Saturn are nearest the eye. The remainder of the scene ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mind, and he doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a projected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off the impregnable mind shield that the bigot has ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... him shut the door after him. But as soon as Butas was gone out, he took his sword, and stabbed it into his breast; yet not being able to use his hand so well, on account of the swelling, he did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise, that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where seeing him lie weltering in his blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and Chaldeans and Sumerians are all dead and gone, but they continue to influence our own lives in everything we do, in the letters we write, in the language we use, in the complicated mathematical problems which we must solve before we can build a ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... multitudinous number of flashes that sparkled from their paddles as they swung rhythmically into and out of the water: and they were all keeping line too, for the whole ten swung up into view together on the crest of a sea, and then disappeared again in the trough, with almost mathematical regularity and precision. Without a doubt the anticipated invasion of our island by the savages was about to take place; and, equally without a doubt too, the invaders must gain a footing upon our territory before ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... applications by learned philosophers and mathematicians. These have labored with a godlike energy and skill to trace the interior relationships existing between the recondite revelations of their Geometry, their wonderful laws of mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which by common consent are understood to be exponential of certain phases of our own existence. No well-organized intellect can fail to perceive that a sublime and immortal Truth underlies these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Journal General de I'Instruction Publique,—have thrown much new light on his life. From journals of a voyage made by him at a later period to the coast of Labrador,—given in substance by Margry,—he seems to have been a man of close and intelligent observation. His mathematical acquirements appear to have ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Honore. His foot was less painful after his good night's rest. His wonder and admiration were again excited by the neatness and perfect order that prevailed throughout the encampment, the six guns of a battery aligned with mathematical precision and accompanied by their caissons, prolonges, forage-wagons, and forges. A short way off, lined up to their rope, stood the horses, whinnying impatiently and turning their muzzles to the rising sun. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... silence followed this ultimatum, then Caradoc said, "Oh, it's possible, I suppose. The mathematical formula of possibility would work out about ten million chances to one that ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... in the heavens and in the giant mathematical and physical methods of interpreting them. It so happened that the war-like planet, with its sinister aspect, was just at this time to be seen hanging in the west, a fiery red; and the easily aroused public mind was being stirred to its shallow ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... riddle; I cannot comprehend why they all make themselves unhappy and why they all serve a malicious demon with a thorny sceptre, why Charlotte, who strews incense before him daily, yes, hourly, should prepare misfortune for them all with mathematical precision! Is not love free? Are those two not affinities? Why should she prevent them from living this innocent life with and near each other? They are twins; twined round each other they ripen on to their birth into the light, and she would separate these seedlings ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and its immortality, that consolatory hope of persecuted virtue, be nothing more than amiable and splendid chimeras? But in how much obscurity are these difficult problems involved? What accumulated objections arise when we wish to examine them with mathematical rigor? No! it is not given to the human mind to behold these truths in the full day of perfect evidence; but why should the man of sensibility repine at not being able to demonstrate what he feels to be true? In the silence of the closet and the dryness of discussion, I can ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... a new edition of it in 1748; when he not only altered the disposition of some of the old, but also introduced more than a little new matter into that work: particularly he has placed some mathematical points in a clearer light, than they before appeared; he has entered into the discussion of "a difficult question, which has raised great contention among philosophers: viz. whereas water is more than eight hundred times heavier ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... prophetic knowledge is inferior to natural knowledge, which needs no sign, and in itself implies certitude. (17) Moreover, Scripture warrants the statement that the certitude of the prophets was not mathematical, but moral. (18) Moses lays down the punishment of death for the prophet who preaches new gods, even though he confirm his doctrine by signs and wonders (Deut. xiii.); "For," he says, "the Lord also worketh signs and ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... stood and the wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through the intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his father. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... every effect has a sufficient and a commensurate cause, not en bloc, but in matter, energy, mind, and spirit. Action and reaction are definite mathematical processes. The parallelogram of force tends everywhere to equilibrium and secures further action and new processes under ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Augustin (1801-1877). Born at Gray in Savoy; wrote many mathematical treatises. His Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire was published ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... nooks and corners. This palace of mine was very high, and its resources, in the way of crannies and windings, seemed to be interminable. Nothing seemed to stop anywhere. Cul-de-sacs were unknown on the premises. The corridors and passages, like mathematical lines, seemed capable of indefinite extension, and the object of the architect must have been to erect an edifice in which people might go ahead forever. The whole place was gloomy, not so much because it was large, but because an unearthly nakedness ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... are songs not void of beauty. The moral writings are of a decidedly higher grade. Works of fiction are constructed with considerable skill, and are sometimes not wanting in humor. Some of the hymns are not destitute of merit. It can not be doubted that there were important mathematical writings. Astronomical observations were very early made. In medicine, we have writings which prove that considerable proficiency was attained in this department. But here, as in other branches, the spirit ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... three envelopes and chose for my next experiment one addressed in a delicate female hand. It seemed to me scarcely possible that letters formed as these were could convey sentiments of any but a fragrant kind. I turned out to be mistaken. This letter was more pitiless even than Selby-Harrison's stark mathematical statements. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... design,' said the theologian, taking no notice of the poet, 'though you won't admit it. Why won't you take up with my scientific religion?—a religion, you know, that can be expressed with equal facility by emotional or by mathematical terms. It is as easy, when you once understand it, as the first proposition in Euclid. You have two points, Faith and Reason, and you draw a straight line between them. Then you must describe an equilateral ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... verity; gospel, gospel truth, God's honest truth; orthodoxy &c. 983a; authenticity; veracity &c. 543; correctness, correctitude[obs3]. accuracy, exactitude; exactness, preciseness &c. adj.; precision, delicacy; rigor, mathematical precision, punctuality; clockwork precision &c. (regularity) 80; conformity to rule; nicety. orthology[obs3]; ipsissima verba[Lat]; realism. plain truth, honest truth, sober truth, naked truth, unalloyed truth, unqualified truth, stern truth, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... public opinion; and though there might be three or four of these public sentiments, so long as each had its party, no one was afraid to avow it; but as for maintaining a notion that was not thus upheld, there was a savour of aristocracy about it that would damn even a mathematical proposition, though regularly solved and proved. So much and so long had Mr. Dodge respired a moral atmosphere of this community-character, and gregarious propensity, that he had, in many things, lost all sense of his individuality; as much so, in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 algebraic formulae and Euclid's propositions her fine memory saved her. But with quick intuition she threw herself frankly upon the boy's generosity, and in the evenings together they, with Margaret's assistance, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... unknown temperature, and often 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 ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... reflections as from a mirror, and how we must make them out as best we can for the present, knowing that, in due season, we shall see the realities for which these things stand to the human mind. He knew that back of the mathematical symbols stood the eternal, unvarying, indestructible principles which govern their use. And he had begun to see that back of the symbols, the phenomena, of human existence stands the great principle—infinite God—the eternal mind. In the realm of mathematics the principles are omnipotent ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... early found out that mathematical exactness and beauty were not the same. By making its two sides geometrically equal, the living expression of the most beautiful marble statue is destroyed, and it becomes simply a piece of architecture. It is well known that the two sides of the human ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... pay even more than the stipulated price—its weight in silver per rifle. But food is made for men as well as slaves, and if you, in your noble trustfulness, resolutely decline to reduce your daily rations, there must, with mathematical certitude of date, arrive the final period to any given and limited supply. Though banking wholly with Heaven in the matter of their own salvation from hunger, the Argonauts displayed mere worldly wisdom ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... but a Pudding of Elements. Empires, Kingdoms, States and Republicks are but Puddings of People differently made up. The Celestial and Terrestrial Orbs are decypher'd to us by a pair of Globes or Mathematical Puddings. ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... attention of Congress to the close of the report of the Secretary of the Navy, in which the humiliating weakness of the present organization of his Department is exhibited and the startling abuses and waste of its present methods are exposed. The conviction is forced upon us with the certainty of mathematical demonstration that before we proceed further in the, restoration of a Navy we need a thoroughly reorganized Navy Department. The fact that within seventeen years more than $75,000,000 have been spent in the construction, repair, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, 1843-56; secured in 1847 the election of the Prince Consort as Chancellor; enlarged the buildings of Trinity College and founded professorship and scholarships for international law. Published and edited many works on natural and mathematical science, philosophy, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... blossom. The stiff soil of these plains was here and there marked by very regular pentagonal, hexagonal, and heptagonal cracks, and, as these cracks retain the moisture of occasional rains better than the intervening space, they were fringed with young grass, which showed these mathematical figures very distinctly. We passed a great number of dry swamps or swampy water-holes; sometimes however containing a little water. They were surrounded by the Mangrove myrtle (Stravadium), which was mentioned as growing at the lower Lynd. The bottom of the dry swamps was covered with a couch ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... with whom I talked, who had lived in and about the canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here, the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and deepening could not have been apprehended by ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... twelve 'n' fourteen's—er—twelve—'n'—fourteen—" The unsteady sheepherder was laboring earnestly with the problem. "She ain't no spring chicken, she ain't!" He laughed tipsily, and winked up at the singer, but Billy was not observing him and his mathematical struggles. He refreshed himself from the glass, leaving the contents perceptibly lower—it was a large, thick glass with a handle, and it had flecks of foam down the inside—took a pull at the cigarette and ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... spot near the banks of the numerous lakes in which this region abounds, and where the water is about 4 inches deep, and still, she builds, with her tail and snout, a circular embankment 3 inches in height and 2 thick. The circle, which is as perfect a one as could be formed with mathematical instruments, is usually a foot and a half in diameter; and at one side of this circular wall an opening is left by the fish of just sufficient width to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... to come to him naturally, and having the genius to comprehend them so readily, he had the courage to hold on to them often in the face of adverse criticism. While conscious of having a perfectly correct eye, however, he did not scorn the humbler method of obtaining exactness by mathematical measurement. The following incident, which he related to Dr. Bellows, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... comprising the language of the starry heavens in their threefold manifestation upon the external planes of life; while the radiant constellations are the ideas which find expression through this language, which is likewise a science, accurate in its mathematical construction and perfect ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Geistliches Magazien (1764)—for which Christopher Sauer cast his own type, the first made in America—and the first religious weekly was The Religious Remembrancer (September 4, 1813). Philadelphia led off with the first penny paper (The Cent) in 1830; and the first mathematical journal (The Annulus), and the first Juvenile Magazine (1802), and the first illustrated comical paper on an original plan, The John Donkey, in 1848, were ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... have acted more wisely. Sir John complains that the opinion of that excellent mathematician, Mr. Thomas Simpson, did not preponderate in favour of the semicircular arch. But he should have known, that however eminent Mr. Simpson was in the higher parts of abstract mathematical science, he was little versed in mixed and practical mechanicks. Mr. Muller, of Woolwich Academy, the scholastick father of all the great engineers which this country has employed for forty years, decided the question by declaring clearly in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... prolonged his impromptu visit for a year. During that period his habits must have been rather amazing to a well-regulated household. His wants, indeed, were simple, and, in one sense, regular; a particular joint of mutton, cut according to a certain mathematical formula, and an ounce of laudanum, made him happy for a day. But in the hours when ordinary beings are awake he was generally to be found stretched in profound opium-slumbers upon a rug before the fire, and it was only about two or three in the morning that he gave unequivocal symptoms ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... an Arabic MS. on a mathematical subject offers an instance of the extraordinary sagacity I am alluding to; it may also serve as a demonstration of the peculiar and supereminent advantages possessed by mathematicians, observes Mr. Dugald Stewart, in their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Subscript characters are shown within {braces}. The mathematical symbol pi is ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... marker long enough to inspire them with a desire to accomplish similar feats of dexterity, they continued their walk to Broad Street, and, turning up a yard opposite to the Clarendon, found that Betteris had an upstair room at liberty. Here they accomplished several pleasing mathematical problems with the balls, and contributed their modicum towards the smoking of the ceiling ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... (1765-1842) was, as a young man, manager of a flax mill in Scotland. In 1804 he was made professor of mathematics at the Royal Military College, then at Marlow and later at Sandhurst. He was deeply interested in mathematical physics, and there is a theorem on the attraction of ellipsoids that bears his name. He was awarded three medals of the Royal Society, and was knighted together with Herschel ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... inferior ideas, that are perfectly, indivisible: consequently this idea implies no contradiction: consequently it is possible for extension really to exist conformable to it: and consequently all the arguments employed against the possibility of mathematical points are mere scholastick quibbles, and ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Mary Everest Boole that it is very confusing to have distinctive names for eleven and twelve, which the child is apt to class with the single numbers and contrast with the teens, and she proposes at the beginning (The Cultivation of the Mathematical Imagination, Colchester: Benham & Co.) to use the words "one-ten," "two-ten," thirteen, fourteen, etc., for the second decade in counting. Her proposal is entirely in harmony with the general drift of the admirably suggestive diagrams of number order collected by Mr. Francis Gallon. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... others not so well known. He has been in the East, has seen the caravans of Mecca and the goods they carried, and, like Columbus, has conceived in his mind the roundness of the world as a practical fact rather than a mere mathematical theory. Hearing of Columbus's success Cabot sets what machinery in England he has access to in motion to secure for him patents from King Henry VII.; which patents he receives on March 5, 1496. After spending a long time in preparation, and being perhaps a little delayed by ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... does not seem so much to depend upon their design, as far as the mere determination of the suitable profile or cross section is concerned, as that has been very exhaustively investigated, and fairly agreed upon, from a mathematical point of view, but to be principally due to the correctness of the estimate of the floods to be dealt with, and a sufficient provision of by-wash allowed for the most extreme cases; and, lastly, perhaps the most important ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... Barlow, one of the mathematical master-spirits of the age, was bold enough once to doubt this vast power of suction on the part of the ruler of the night; and there were certain wiseacres who, as in the case of Galileo, thought it very religiously dangerous ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... made by Pythagoras to human wisdom seem to have been vast and permanent. By probable testimony, he added largely to mathematical science; and his discoveries in arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry, constitute an era in the history of the mind. His metaphysical and moral speculations are not to be separated from the additions or corruptions of his disciples. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... again and again to Aristotle for those elements in his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose, self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to details, and a broad and generous policy that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Life-Savers and Their Apparatus Moving Pictures—Some Strange Subjects and How They Were Taken Bridge Builders and Some of Their Achievements Submarines in War and Peace Long-Distance Telephony—What Happens When You Talk into a Telephone Receiver A Machine That Thinks—A Type-Setting Machine That Makes Mathematical Calculations How ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... of which she made a drawing, her power of drawing correctly her life-circle, and sun-circle, and the mathematical feeling she had of her existence, in correspondent sections of the two, are also valuable as mental facts. These figures describe her history and exemplify the position of mathematics toward the world ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... name of the man who wrote these books was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, but every one knows him better as Lewis Carroll. He was a staid and learned mathematician, who wrote valuable books on most difficult mathematical subjects; for instance, he wrote a Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry, and it is not a joke, though the name may sound like one to a person who has read Alice in Wonderland. However, there was one subject in which this grave lecturer on mathematics was more ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... colleagues," he continued, "I will be brief. I will lay aside the material projectile—the projectile that kills—in order to take up the mathematical projectile—the moral projectile. A cannon-ball is to me the most brilliant manifestation of human power, and by creating it man has approached nearest to ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... clumsy. Then Miss Batchelor joined in; and, because she found that she was more skillful than the rest, she began, first to take a languid interest in the game, then to play as if her life depended on it. She aimed with mathematical precision, picking out all the tiny difficult places that other people missed or grazed. Amongst them they had ended by burying Mrs. Nevill Tyson up to her neck in a fairly substantial pile of pebbles. It only needed one more stone to complete the work. Still, as I said before, Mrs. ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... swift trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before, and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... information is presented in Appendix E: Weights and Measures and includes mathematical notations (mathematical powers and names), metric interrelationships (prefix; symbol; length, weight, or capacity; area; ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Indeed, his claims could not have been ignored without glaring injustice. He was the Senior Wrangler of his year, and First Smith's Prizeman, and the epithet 'incomparabilis' was attached to his name in the Mathematical Tripos. He continued to reside at the University after he had taken his degree, and was appointed Professor of Mathematics, President of his college (Queen's), and finally, Dean of Carlisle. Isaac Milner's services to the Evangelical cause were invaluable. Holding a prominent ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... also a mathematical house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... opposite wall, close to the right hand corner. Between this door and the left hand corner is a hatstand and a table consisting of large drawing boards on trestles, with plans, rolls of tracing paper, mathematical instruments and other draughtsman's accessories on it. In the left hand wall is the fireplace, and the door of an inner room between the fireplace and our observant sparrow. Against the right hand wall is a filing cabinet, with a cupboard on it, and, nearer, a tall office desk and stool for ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... mathematical reasoning, John. Your method is well enough for the building of a fortress or calculating the range of a gun. But it won't do for the actions of men. You allow nothing for feeling, sentiment, association, propinquity, heredity, ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... at Paris was very guarded in what it said. In the mathematical section they had not thought the statement worth noticing; in the meridional section they knew nothing about it; in the physical observatory they had not come across it; in the geodetic section they had had no observation; in the meteorological section there had been no record; ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... also, proved too severe for Margaret's mathematical endowments, and (it is extraordinary how childish the very greatest girls can be) she was playing at "oughts and crosses" with Janey Harman when the arithmetic master came round. He sat down, not unwillingly, beside Miss Shields, erased, without comment, the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... thanking those who have so kindly assisted me in my work, and first I must mention my old schoolmaster, the Rev. Watson Hagger, M.A., to whom my readers are indebted for the portions of this book dealing with Mr. Dodgson's mathematical works. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Dodgson's relatives, and to all those kind friends of his and others who have aided me, in so many ways, in my difficult task. In particular, I may mention the names of H.R.H. the Duchess of Albany; Miss Dora Abdy; ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... confer upon the through traveler the gift of an excursion through the capital. This loop swings southwardly from Baltimore to a point near Frederick, Washington being set upon it like a bead in the midst. The older road, like a mathematical chord, stretches still between the first points, but is occupied with the carrying of freight. The tourist notices the stout beams of the bridges, the new look of the sleepers, and the sheen of the double lines of fresh steel rail: he observes some heavy mason-work at the Monocacy River. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... directions, then, having summed up his calculations with much gravity, gave directions to those about him to line off with stakes and ropes the space which he pointed out to them, and which in fact enclosed nearly half the village. In the course of these operations, the usher, who had witnessed these mathematical proceedings of Jack from the window, but could not comprehend what the man would be at, sallied forth, and accosting Jack, asked him what he meant by these strange lines of circumvallation. "Why," answered Jack, "I have been thinking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... a slight, rather tall figure, a carriage that was lively, yet full of nobility, a pleasing voice, and a laugh as merry as the humour through which she could pass with ease from the most playful and childish amusements to the most fatiguing mathematical calculations." ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he creates it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. But you cannot make any thing true which results from, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... Savile was born at Over Bradley, near Halifax in Yorkshire, Nov. 30th, 1549, and was entered of Merton College, Oxford. He was Greek and Mathematical Preceptor to Queen Elizabeth, and was one of the Translators of the Bible, under James I., who knighted him in 1604. He died ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... less exasperating, by letter) to consider the offer of the Clarendon Trustees, as well as every other subject of human or inhuman, interest, capable of consideration, it has occurred to me to suggest for your consideration how desirable roofed buildings are for carrying on mathematical calculations; in fact, the variable character of the weather in Oxford renders it highly inexpedient to attempt much occupation, of a sedentary nature, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... woman, of the flabby order of nerves. She will probably faint when she hears what has happened. She might box a man's ears, but her arm would never drive a dagger home into his heart, especially with such beautiful, almost mathematical accuracy. We must look elsewhere, I fancy, for the person who has paid Bentham's debt to society. Heneage, here, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which our finite brains cannot estimate without reeling,—enormous forces always at work, in the mighty movements of which our earth is nothing more than a grain of sand. Yet far more marvellous than their size or number is the mathematical exactitude of their proportions,—the minute perfection of their balance,—the exquisite precision with which every one part is fitted to another part, not a pin's point awry, not a hair's breadth astray. Well, the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Mathematics, being the Reports of the Committee of the Mathematical Association. ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... fine parts and scholarly attainments, earnestly bent upon doing his whole duty, vigorous, energetic and thorough in everything, Carter was just the man to conduct a school with mathematical precision, but at the same time, his natural irritability was such that the whirlwind was less fierce than his wrath, when the latter was aroused. About the time of his advent among the pupils at the Little York public school, gum-chewing had become an accomplishment among the boys, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... a reel in the shape of a rhombus. The learned Judge says "In this case, the reel itself, as an article of manufacture, is conceded to be old and not the subject of a patent. The shape applied to it by the complainant is also an old, well-known mathematical figure. Now although it does not appear that any person ever before applied this particular shape to this particular article, I cannot think that the act quoted above was intended to secure to the complainant an exclusive right to use this ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of the bees are found perfectly to answer all the most refined conditions of a very intricate mathematical problem! Let it be required to find what shape a given quantity of matter must take, in order to have the greatest capacity, and the greatest strength, requiring at the same time, the least space, and the least labor in its construction. This problem has been ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... distance above the water, it showed a blue that vied with the color of the deep ocean, the use of copper being then unknown; while the more superior parts were of a jet black, delicately relieved by two lines, of a straw-color, that were drawn, with mathematical accuracy, parallel to the plane of her upper works, and consequently converging slightly towards the sea, beneath her counter. Glossy hammock-cloths concealed the persons of those who were on the deck, while the close bulwarks gave the brigantine ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... she went through Mrs. Cornelius's Receipt Book as if it were a mathematical exercise, working out the problems with patience and care. Sometimes her family were invited in to help eat up a too bounteous feast of successes, or Lotty would be privately dispatched with a batch of failures, which were to be concealed from all eyes ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... by some abstruse and difficult mathematical work far beyond the power of ordinary brains, found out not only the fact that there must be another planet nearly as large as Uranus in an orbit outside his, but actually predicted where such a planet might be seen if anyone would look for it. He gave ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... the weakness of which I accuse you is not a weakness of the understanding. I find no fault either with the logical or the mathematical part of your understanding. It is not erroneous in either of the two great points in which Bacon says that most men's minds be deficient in—the power of judging of consequences, or in the power of estimating ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... doubt of it—but I have read a little anecdote of him. Somebody asked the president of a Western railroad company, in which McClellan was an engineer, what he thought about his abilities. "Well," said the president, "he is a first-rate man to build bridges; he is very exact, very mathematical in measurement, very precise in adjusting the timber; he is the best man in the world to build a good, strong, sound bridge, but after he has finished it, he never wishes anybody to cross over it." (Great laughter). Well, we have disposed of him partially, but we PAY him yet, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... blankly; his features worked as if he were trying to solve a mathematical problem. He started to speak, but his mouth fell open and remained so; his lower lip hung ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... in any study but that of Webster's Elementary. But in that he was—to use the usual Flat Creek locution—in that he was "a hoss." This genius for spelling is in some people a sixth sense, a matter of intuition. Some spellers are born, and not made, and their facility reminds one of the mathematical prodigies that crop out every now and then to bewilder the world. Bud Means, foreseeing that Ralph would be pitted against Jim Phillips, had warned his friend that Jim could "spell like thunder and lightning," and that it "took a powerful smart speller" to beat him, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... whole lasting and effectual difference between the organic and inorganic in nothing else than in the way and manner of motion—namely, that the motion of the organic molecules is different from that of the inorganic molecules—and when he traces this difference with mathematical exactness, then an assertion which simply denies that difference, without attempting to show the identity of the two motions, to say nothing of proving this identity, is nothing more than a clear evidence ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... nothing that I have to do that a classical and mathematical scholar and nursling lawyer ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that, sir. I have my duty to perform. Anybody can do those childish history and grammatical questions; it is the classical and mathematical lessons in which I wish you to excel. Now, once more. No, no, you must not refer to the book. 'In any right-angled triangle, the square of the side—' ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... computations which are strictly accurate, they mislead instead of guiding aright. The mind is easily imposed upon by the false affectation of exactness, which prevails even in the misstatements of science, and it adopts with confidence errors which are dressed in the forms of mathematical truth. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... dash themselves like great moths against these gigantic lanterns. The building which encloses and sustains this mechanism, and in which it is set, is also mathematically constructed. Everything about it is plain, exact, bare, precise, correct. A lighthouse is a mathematical figure. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use," said the gentleman, "for all these purposes, combinations and modifications in primary colors of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... long explanation. Psi wasn't a physical force; it was more like the application of a mental "set," in the mathematical sense, to the existing order. But it could be detected by specially built instruments—and a shield could be set up behind which no detection was possible. It wasn't accurate to say that a psi force was blocked by the shield; no construct can block that which has no real physical ...
— Sight Gag • Laurence Mark Janifer
... on either side of the river and Ganimard and his men were following the craft, which swung down the stream, carried very slowly by the current. It meant inevitable, mathematical capture. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... have taken the mathematical or map gradient and not the engineer's gradient. The latter is generally used, I understand, to measure the gradients ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... money—save ammunition. Does any pessimist intend to argue that we shall not get all the ammunition we need? It is inconceivable that we should not get it. When we have got it the end can be foretold like the answer to a mathematical problem. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... anatomy towards a pure morphology. It is significant that in later times the term correlation has come to be applied more especially to the purely empirical constancies of relation, and has lost most of its functional significance. But the correlation of the parts of an organism is no mere mathematical concept, to be expressed by a coefficient, but something deeper ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... known to Egyptologists as the Old Empire. Kings of the Fourth dynasty, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura, built the great pyramids of Giza, the largest of which is still one of the wonders of the world. Its huge granite blocks are planed with mathematical exactitude, and, according to Professor Flinders Petrie, have been worked by means of tubular drills fitted with the points of emeralds or some equally hard stone. It was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover the instrument when the Mont Cenis tunnel was ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... stairs which she treads. Watts being waiting, she treads—or is it kinder to say trips?—with good blithe speed. D is the side door and E the side porch. Now I ask you, oh master of engineering and weird mechanical and mathematical mysteries, what is to prevent Nora from getting from A to E in the interval of time between the coughing ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... Alain was a warm and true friend to me; he never failed to understand me, to approve my course of action and to love me. His clear and sound intellect and his great capacity for work adapted him for a profession in which mathematical knowledge is of value or for magisterial functions. The misfortunes of our family caused him to follow a different career, and he underwent many hardships with unshaken courage. He never complained of his lot, though ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... dreadful place I have ever seen or conceived of! It frightens me. The dryness of pure science is terrifying enough, but after all that has a kind of strange beauty, because it deals either with transcendental ideas of mathematical relation, or with the deducing of principle from accumulated facts. But here the object appears to be to eliminate the human element from humanity. I insist upon knowing where you have brought me, and what is ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... saw a trunk full of presents packed and sent off. And when I recollected my first acquaintance with him, I could not but marvel over the change that had taken place, before books, drawing materials, and mathematical instruments could have been chosen as the gifts ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... is not a mathematical treatise, it will be impossible for us to discuss the proofs which Newton has given, and which have commanded the immediate and universal acquiescence of all who have taken the trouble to understand ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... said calmly, "there are two ways of dying in the circumstances in which we are placed." (This puzzling person had the air of a mathematical professor lecturing to his pupils.) "The first is to be crushed; the second is to die of suffocation. I do not speak of the possibility of dying of hunger, for the supply of provisions in the Nautilus ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... so much respect for the business, mathematical, and scientific mind of Germany, that I cannot believe she will prefer the destruction of the German people, individually or collectively, to the destruction of the German war-machine which set ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron |
