"Mathematician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 truly and justly, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... that has brought you here in spite of yourself. Listen: you are a man full of piety, but if you do not confess that she is the mother of the gods, your ruin is certain. Do you know that the old mathematician, Melanthes, used to say, 'I cannot demonstrate the properties of a triangle without ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... ideas are so loose and uncertain, I would fain ask any mathematician what infallible assurance he has, not only of the more intricate, and obscure propositions of his science, but of the most vulgar and obvious principles? How can he prove to me, for instance, that two right lines cannot have one common segment? Or that it is impossible ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... to Italy was the strongest came clearly into view. This antagonism stood embodied in its extreme form in the contrast between Mazzini and Cavour. Mazzini, handling moral and political conceptions with something of the independence of a mathematician, laid it down as the first duty of the Italian nation to possess itself of Rome and Venice, regardless of difficulties that might be raised from without. By conviction he desired that Italy should be a Republic, though under certain conditions he ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Mr Baffin was a mathematician and mariner, to whom our northern and north-western voyages ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... roused all France to enthusiasm. Paris was one prolonged storm of applause, and when one praised an object, he said "It is fine as the Cid!" The play was translated into the different languages of all the civilized nations. Fontenelle says: "I knew two men, a soldier and a mathematician, who had never heard of any other play that had ever been written, but the name of Cid had penetrated even the barbarous state ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... many notable gentlemen (for true gentlemen they are, though their purses are thin) who have given up their lives to educating the progeny of the inclement North. Lamont, for example, whom I remember as a first-class mathematician, is living in the marshy navel of an Outer Isle, amid wild-fowl and spirals of peat-reek. If you want to visit him you have (1) to cross the billowy western deep; (2) drive fifteen miles in a trap; (3) traverse a ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... were infatuated, among them the marvelous Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, not less remarkable as humanist and Hebraist, who would have run grave risk at the hands of the Inquisition at Cologne if he had not been saved by Leo X. Cardan, a mathematician and physician, was one of the learned men of the day most impregnated with Kabbalism. He believed in a kind of infallibility of the inner sense, of the intuition, and regarded as futile all sciences that proceeded by slow rational ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Indies," which appears further on in this edition.] and in a secret mappe of those partes made in Mexico the yeere before; for the king of Spaine, (which originall with many others is in the custodie of the excellent Mathematician M. Thomas Hariot) as also in their intercepted letters come vnto my hand, bearing date 1595, they acknowledge the In-land to be a better and richer countrey then Mexico and Nueua Spania itselfe. And on the other side ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... England to a frenzy of king-worship. The Roundhead, General Monk, and his soldiers proclaimed Charles King of England and escorted him to London in splendid state. That was a day when national feeling reached a point such as never has been before or since. Oughtred, the famous mathematician, died of joy when the royal emblems were restored. Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, died, it is said, of laughter at the people's ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... how a mathematician could write 'Alice in Wonderland'," Helen Nash remarked to Marion after Mr. Stanlock had withdrawn to the diningroom and ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... the mathematician and divine, had an habitual dislike of dogs, and it proceeded from the following cause:—He was a very early riser; and one morning, as he was walking in the garden of a friend's house, with whom he was staying, a fierce mastiff, that used to ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Louvain, where he learned rapidly. At sixteen or seventeen he knew not only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofs of Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with the works of the Mussulman physicians. He was a physicist too, and a mathematician, according to the knowledge of those times; but his passion—the study to which he was destined to ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... God knows!" returned Vergniaud, with a heavy but impatient sigh, "I suppose there is, there must be, some terribly exact Mathematician concerned in the working of things, else a man's past sins and failings being done with and over, would not turn up any more. But they DO turn up,—the unseen Mathematician counts every figure;—and of course trouble ensues. My ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... palpable to them; and thereby they participate in the kernel of the matter so far as they are able. I may add as an explanation that the use of mystery has been attempted even in philosophy; for example, when Pascal, who was pietest, mathematician, and philosopher in one, says in this threefold character: God is everywhere centre and nowhere periphery. Malebranche has also truly remarked, La liberte est un mystere. One might go further, and maintain ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the celebrated mathematician, was a native of Scotland, and the son of the Duke of Argyle's gardener. Before he attained the age of eighteen years, he had acquired a knowledge of geometry, &c., without a master. When he was asked by the Duke of Argyle how he had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... third century B.C., Syracuse, in Sicily, was the home of Archimedes, the greatest mathematician that ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... that for many years to come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and skill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching must increase until up went its nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggerated every ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... most strenuously defended by the Catholic priest and natural philosopher, Michelis, in his Haeckelogony: An Academic Protest against Haeckel's Anthropogeny (1875). In still more "academic" and somewhat mystic form the theory was advanced by a natural philosopher of the older Jena school—the mathematician and physicist, Carl Snell. But it received its chief support on the zoological side from Anton Dohrn, who maintained the anthropocentric ideas of Snell with particular ability. The Amphioxus, which modern science now almost unanimously regards as the real Primitive Vertebrate, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the Roman arms seemed to be favoured in other parts; Marcel'lus took the city of Syr'acuse, in Sicily, defended by the machines and the fires of Archime'des,[3] the mathematician. 15. The inhabitants were put to the sword, and among the rest, Archime'des himself, who was found, by a Roman soldier, meditating in his study. 16. Marcel'lus, the general, was not a little grieved at his death. A love of literature at that time began to prevail among ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... twenty-five, and had married, his life was one continuous devotion to the 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 ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But nature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity to mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and to give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery over things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the hypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in that. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use of mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business world; whereas its inherent use is emancipating ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... he ask what is to become of mathematics under similar circumstances, were they possible. I maintain that two and two the mathematician would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five. We are told that Mr. Ruskin has devoted his long life to art, and as a result—is "Slade ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... this activity is General Foch. There in the north he is putting his theories of war to the test with as much success as he did at the outbreak of hostilities in Lorraine and later in the centre during the battle of the Marne. Although born with the brain of a mathematician, General Foch's ideas upon war are by no means purely scientific. He refuses, indeed, to regard war, and more especially modern war, as an exact science. The developments of science have, indeed, but increased ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... besides, he attributed to the oscillation an absolute generality of isochronism, which they did not possess; nor did he know how to apply his famous discovery to the measurement of time. In fact, it was not till after more than half a century had elapsed, in 1657, to be exact, that the celebrated Dutch mathematician and astronomer, Huygens, published his memoirs in which he made known to the world the degree of perfection which would accrue to clocks if the pendulum were ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... Dr. Charles Hutton, the Woolwich mathematician. His note is a little in the vaunting vein of that "founder of fortun's," the excellent Uncle Pumblechook of Great Expectations, for his services scarcely amounted to "initiating" Bewick or his master into the art of engraving on wood. Moreover, his memory must ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... 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 of so much heat and weakness. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... good artist; indeed he was nothing but a humpbacked and very sensitive little squire with about 3000 a year of his own and great liking for intricate amusements. He was a pretty good mathematician and a tolerable fisherman. He knew an enormous amount about the Mohammedan conquest of Spain, and he is, I believe, writing a book upon that subject. I hope he will, for nearly all history wants to be rewritten. Anyhow, he, as I have just said, did copy a corner of one of the Dutch pictures ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... is known as "the quantification of 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 propositions ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... I began to read mathematics with Mr Rogers (formerly, I think, a Fellow of Sidney College, and an indifferent mathematician of the Cambridge school), who had succeeded a Mr Tweed as assistant to Mr Crosse in the school. I went to his house twice a week, on holiday afternoons. I do not remember how long I received lessons from him, but I think to ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... also added. The Headmaster must be a Clergyman of the Church of England, and a Master of Arts. He must be a good Classical Scholar and a Mathematician, thoroughly capable of teaching both subjects, and qualified to teach Logic, Rhetoric, English in all its branches, and Moral and Political Philosophy. The requirements in an Usher were less exceptional. ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... him adrift rather than kill him, or let him kill me. Anyway he had only some fifty miles to travel to strike an Indian village. When he was there we were a hundred and fifty miles apart. You see I am a mathematician. It is a great joy to figure out what a long distance you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 examination of the original Ladies' ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... first arrivals was Sir Lionel Borridge, the inventor of the most up-to-date calculating machine, and a mathematician of renown. He had a conical brow like a beautifully polished knee, and very sad eyes which seemed to proclaim to the world that the study of mathematics was, on the whole, a most harrowing occupation. With him came his aged wife and spinster daughter. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... have proceeded only from negligence; but it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now diverted from the pursuit of BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his friend Frend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative quantities of mathematicians were merae nugae, things scarcely in rerum natura, and smacking too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Frend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute once set a-going has seized violently on George's pericranick; and it is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... China, vol. vi, p. 208. The work begun by Ricci (see vol. xv, p. 178) was continued by Johann Adam Schall von Bell, a German Jesuit, who entered China in 1622, remaining there until his death in 1669. He was a noted astronomer and mathematician, and for his learning and talents was greatly esteemed by the Chinese, especially at the imperial court; the reformation of the Chinese calendar was entrusted to him, and rank and emoluments were conferred upon him. The missions in China were not molested ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... 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 addresses, although, in truth, the gang-punch merely provides ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... congenial to his dispositions, that he devoted himself to mathematics. In his last moments, when he retained no further recollection of the friends who surrounded his bed, one of them, perhaps to make a philosophical experiment, thought proper to ask him the square of twelve: our dying mathematician instantly, and perhaps without knowing that he answered, replied, "One hundred ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... disposed to deplore the degree both of his modesty and his scholarship, for he possesses one of the rarest and most precious of gifts in a very learned man, particularly a mathematician and a theologian, namely, the gift of lucid exposition. Few men of our day, in my judgment, are better qualified to state the whole case for Christianity than this distinguished Canon of Westminster Abbey, this evangelical Fellow of the Royal Society, who is nevertheless prevented from ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... until the room was quite full. I was very glad to be introduced to Professor Stokes, who is called the best mathematician in England, and is a friend of Adams. He is very handsome—almost all Englishmen are handsome, because they look healthy; but Professor Stokes has fine black eyes and dark hair and good features. He looks very young and innocent. Stokes ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... Regiomontanus—A decidedly xylographical production; the first date is 1475, the last 1525. A fine sound copy, but cropt. In a duplicate copy the name of the mathematician is given at ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... obtained his leave, Le Maire, who knows him well, has since conferred with him and has learnt his opinions on these subjects; with regard to which the Englishman had also intercourse with Plancius, a great geographer and clever mathematician. Plancius maintains, according to the reasons of his science, and from the information given him, ... that there must be in the northern parts a passage corresponding to the one found near the south pole by Magellan.... The Englishman also reports that, having been to ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... mathematician is the most servile of mortals. He is useful, but cannot create, or even discover. He weighs and measures. Project one of his angles into space, and, though it may reach within ten feet of a blazing star that dazzles men with eyes, yet he will neither see nor know of its existence. His ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... usual reading might not relieve the inward crisis in which Balthazar was evidently struggling. As he unfolded the sheet he saw the words, "DISCOVERY OF THE ABSOLUTE,"—which startled him, and he read a paragraph to Marguerite concerning a sale made by a celebrated Polish mathematician of the secret of the Absolute. Though Emmanuel read in a low voice, and Marguerite signed to him to omit ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... he would be a very bad companion, and make a very poor figure in that company; or if, in studying a problem in his closet, he were to think of a minuet, I am apt to believe that he would make a very poor mathematician. There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time. The Pensionary de Witt, who was torn to pieces in the year 1672, did the whole business ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... among the flocks. Atlas, the great astronomer, is represented as a shepherd. [1237][Greek: Atlas mathematikos en Libus aner.—Polueidos de ho dithurambopoios ton Atlanta touton POIMENA Libun phesin.] Atlas the great mathematician, was a person of Libya. The Dithyrambic poet Polueidos says, that Atlas was a Libyan shepherd. There was a tradition that the temple of Ammon in Libya was built by a shepherd, from whom it received its name; [1238][Greek: apo tou hidrusamenou poimenos.] It is reported ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... he was not a Florentine, nor did he work here, being engaged chiefly at Urbino, Ferrara, Arezzo, and Rome. His life ended sadly, for he became totally blind. In addition to his painting he was a mathematician of much repute. The Duke of Urbino here depicted is Federigo da Montefeltro, who ruled from 1444 to 1482, and in 1459 married as his second wife a daughter of Alessandro Sforza, of Pesaro, the wedding being the occasion of Piero's ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... 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 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... the famous mathematician think of this effusion in the heyday of the Empire, when he became Count of Pelusium with a Westphalian estate bringing in 200,000 francs a year? A collection of the frank confessions of the ci-devant Jacobins would form an ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... his desperation. "Your remedies are powerful, you tell me; and for the calamities of which you speak to befall me, I would have to be among the rare exceptions—also my wife would have to be among the number of those rare exceptions. If a mathematician were to apply the law of chance to these facts, the result of his operation would show but slight chance of a catastrophe, as compared with the absolute certainty of a series of misfortunes, sufferings, troubles, tears, and ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... trance Jim seemed quickly to awake. 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 ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... surveyor-general, entered into conversation with him and the inspector of police. The latter was a tall, thin man, im-perturbably cool, and, whatever he may have felt, allowed no trace of it to appear on his features. He contemplated this calamity as a mathematician does a problem; he was seeking to solve it, and to find the unknown; and when Glenarvan observed, "This is a great misfortune," he quietly replied, "Better than ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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
... sort of apprenticeship with an English farmer. About this time James, the second son, who had been at sea, came home, and for him also Mary found room in her lodgings until, through her influence, he went to Woolwich, where for a few months he was under the instruction of Mr. Bonnycastle, the mathematician, as a preparation to enter the Royal Navy. He eventually went on Lord Hood's fleet as a midshipman, and was then promoted to the rank of lieutenant, after which he appears to have been able to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... proceeded to Oxford, where he carefully inspected its colleges and churches, afterwards expressing the great delight and profit which he had derived from his visit. He was entertained while there by Mr. Robertson, an eminent mathematician, then superintending the publication of an edition of the works of Archimedes. The architectural designs of buildings that most pleased him were those of Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christchurch about the time of Sir Christopher Wren. He tore himself from Oxford with great ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data for computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration of one Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded up a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all that could be known right now was that ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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 with all Marlborough's campaign, and they ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... common 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 an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... '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 by Baconians nor ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... the mathematician, the integrator gives only that miserly result, a definite integral, but the integraph yields an indefinite integral, a picture of the result at all times or all points—a much greater boon in most mechanical and physical investigations. Members of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... ready to admit that two complete born fools are not at all likely to become the proud father and happy mother of a Shakespeare or a Newton. I suppose everybody will unhesitatingly allow that a great mathematician could hardly by any conceivable chance arise among the South African Bushmen, who cannot understand the arduous arithmetical proposition that two and two make four. No amount of education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... rebel. Such honors might incite the faithful to combat and die under the banners of the saint; and he soon prompted, or accepted, the sacrifice of a virgin, who professed the religion of the Greeks, and cultivated the friendship of Orestes. Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, [25] was initiated in her father's studies; her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus, and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... about 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 ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Barras' favorites, the Vendemiaire general, a street general, "not yet tried out on the field of battle,[1139] hasn't a friend, considered a loner because he is the only one who can thinks for himself, looking peaky, said to be a mathematician and a dreamer!" They enter, and Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, with his sword and belt on, explains the disposition of the forces, gives them his orders, and dismisses them. Augereau has remained silent; It is only when he gets out of doors does he recover ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... who had just been informed of the execution which was about to be carried out on Napoleon. With tears in his eyes, he hastened to Napoleon, and with trembling hands tore from his shoulders the detestable garment, and broke out at the same time in loud complaints that his best scholar, his first mathematician, was to be dishonored and treated in an ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... entering Buntingford. It is a small, quiet, unimportant village; but much of it is picturesque and interesting. Readers will remember that Macaulay was at school here, and that it was the birthplace of Seth Ward, mathematician and bishop, a contemporary and antagonist of Thomas Hobbes. The church is a flint structure,—a conglomeration of many styles. Notable features are the Easter sepulchre in the N. wall of chancel, the Norman window close to it, the piscina, ambry and credence table, discovered ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... than a delight in its own exercise. He can turn his hand to any thing, but he 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 ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... The devil! why, man, Pray get out of this hobble as fast as you can. You wed with Miss Lilac! 'twould be your perdition: She's a poet, a chymist, a mathematician.[614] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... not always result from a good system of education for the young aspirants; for a man may be a good mathematician and a fine scholar, without being a good warrior. The staff should always possess sufficient consideration and prerogative to be sought for by the officers of the several arms, and to draw together, in this way, men who are already known by their aptitude for ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... History of England, Sears' History of the World, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences; and had even attempted to struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics were decidedly beyond both teacher and student. Besides, Edison, like Faraday, was never a mathematician, and has had little personal use for arithmetic beyond that which is called "mental." He said once to a friend: "I can always hire some mathematicians, but they can't hire me." His father, by-the-way, always encouraged these literary tastes, and paid him a small sum for each new book mastered. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... everything else should be scrupulously sacrificed to veracity. But, more than this, God made him, in a sense, a man without imagination—comparatively free from the temptations of an enthusiastic temperament. He was a mathematician rather than a poet, an artisan rather than an artist, and he did not see things invested with a false halo. He was deliberate, not impulsive; calm and not excitable. He naturally weighed every word before ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... know not why it is," said he, "but that story of yours, my friend, brings to my mind a story of a man whom I once knew—a great magician in his time, and a necromancer and a chemist and an alchemist and mathematician and a rhetorician, an astronomer, an astrologer, ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... le Rond, 1717-1783) was an eminent mathematician. He wrote especially, though not at first exclusively, on mathematical subjects, for the "Encyclopaedia." He was, indeed, at the outset, published as mathematical editor of the work. His European reputation in science made his name a tower of strength ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fooling—even for an expert," the mathematician agreed. "No wonder the astronomers think you birds are the ones who are gumming up their dope. Well, it's about time to plug in on E2. Here's where the fireworks start!" He closed the connections which transferred the central portion of the upper lookout screen to a small micrometer screen ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... eminent mathematicians published in 1748 an edition of Newton's Principia; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical censure, they felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false. Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of the Jesuits, used these words: "As for me, full of respect for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisition, I regard the earth as immovable; nevertheless, for simplicity in explanation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a realm of disembodied thinking which his mind was not sufficiently disciplined to summarize. It is quite plain, he said to himself, that I must rub up my vanished mathematics. For certainly the mathematician comes closer to God than any other, since his mind is trained to conceive and formulate the magnificent phantoms of legality. He smiled to think that any one should presume to become a parson without having at least ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... has given him to stay his stomach between breakfast and dinner. The guilelessness of the supernumerary does not last long. A youth enlightened by gleams by Parisian life soon measures the frightful distance that separates him from the head-clerkship, a distance which no mathematician, neither Archimedes, nor Leibnitz, nor Laplace has ever reckoned, the distance that exists between 0 and the figure 1. He begins to perceive the impossibilities of his career; he hears talk of favoritism; he discovers the intrigues of officials: he sees the questionable ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... that the next ten years of his life remain a blank. He joined the Royal Society in 1760, but contributed nothing until 1766, when he published his first paper on "Factitious Airs." Cavendish was a great mathematician, electrician, astronomer, meteorologist, and as a chemist he was equally learned and original. He lived at a time when science was to a large extent but blank empiricism; even the philosophy of combustion was based on erroneous and absurd hypotheses, and the speculation of experimenters ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... not give way to the temptation of enlarging on these topics. The meanest mathematician in Spaceland will readily believe me when I assert that the problems of life, which present themselves to the well-educated—when they are themselves in motion, rotating, advancing or retreating, and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the sense of sight between a number of Polygons of ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... present in his own person a resume of all the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was the miracle of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect, chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter—we are not only astounded by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the practical ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... born colorist, and sought to arouse the imagination by stupendous orchestral effects, frescoes of tone wherein might be discerned terrifying perspectives, sinister avenues of drooping trees melting into iron dusks. If Pobloff was a mathematician, he was also a painter-poet. He did not credit the theory of the alienists, that the confusion of tone and color—audition coloree—betrayed the existence of a slight mental lesion; and he laughed consumedly at the notion of confounding ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... science that can upset the Source of all science! The greatest mathematician that lives did not institute mathematics—he only copies the existing ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... 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
... humorist—perhaps something more than a humorist. "Wit," he explains, "requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power as a mathematician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a fighting thing and a working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Excentricks and Epicycles is altogether impossible, nor is there any Mathematician such a foole as ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... too much stress should not be laid on mathematics, nor should proficiency therein be held to establish the right of entry to a corps d'elite. The typical American officer of the best kind need not be a good mathematician; but he must be able to master himself, to control others, and to show boldness and fertility of resource in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... that our friend Sampson, although a profound scholar and mathematician, had not travelled so far in philosophy as to doubt the reality of witchcraft or apparitions. Born indeed at a time when a doubt in the existence of witches was interpreted as equivalent to a justification ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well-spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind, has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of the reason lead to nothing but affliction of spirit (Traite de ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... is a musical art journal published in Germany, and is thus noticed at page 12. of Warner's edition of Godfrey Weber's Theory of Musical Composition:—"Since 1824 we have been laid under great obligations to our distinguished mathematician and writer on acoustics, Professor W. Weber, for most interesting developments on all these points, which he has arranged into an article in the journal Ccilia, vol. xii., expressly for musicians ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... presented by unfriendly critics is an unpleasing combination of contrasting elements. A tall and active fellow, a good horseman and a good shot, living through seven years of civil war, which he had himself heralded in, without the inclination to strike a blow; a scholar, musician, and mathematician, without delicacy, elevation, or precision of thought or language; a man of intense ambition, without either administrative capacity or the courage to assert himself in counsel or in debate; a dealer in philanthropic ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... certain Mishna ordinances are based upon geometrical propositions, which could have been known to but few mathematicians of that time. Rabbi Gamaliel, said to have made use of a telescope, was celebrated as a mathematician and astronomer, and in 289 C. E., Rabbi Joshua is reported to have calculated the orbit ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... language. He was without that subtlety and accuracy of mind which makes the born scholar. He was capable of blunders surprising in a man of his general ability; and every blunder takes away marks. He was still less of a mathematician. 'I disliked,' as he says himself, 'and foolishly despised the studies of the place, and did not care about accurate classical scholarship, in which I was utterly wrong. I was clumsy at calculation, though I think I have, and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... an excellent violinist, a skilled mathematician and a profound scholar. Add to all these his spotless integrity and honor, his statesmanship, and his well curbed but aggressive patriotism, and he embodied within himself all the attributes of an ideal president ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... to school, as his mother wished, for six months, and then he was going to seek his fortune. But six months passed, and the year came to an end, and Jem was still a pupil in the school of Mr Anstruther—a man among a thousand, Jem thought. He was a great mathematician, at any rate, and had a kind heart, and took interest and pleasure in the progress of one who, like himself, went to his work with a will, as Jem certainly did in ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... died, the famous English mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, was born (1642-1727). He carried on the work of earlier astronomers by the application of higher mathematics, and proved that the force of attraction which we call gravitation was a universal ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... no such instrument, but Matthew's observations are as precise as those of a mathematician. You may hear him repeating incessantly: 'Since Monday I have had more than forty-five,' or else 'I was between fifty-two and fifty-eight,' or else 'I had at least sixty-six to seventy,' or 'Hullo, cheat, I thought I was in the fifties and here I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... The heavy-set mathematician smiled pleasantly as MacHeath and Griffin came into the gun chamber. "I just thought I'd come down and see how you were getting along," he said. His voice was a low tenor, with just a touch of Midwestern twang. "Sometimes the creative mind gets bogged down in ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Europeans, the Pan-Americans. And it is to be noted that, whatever the constituents of these three Powers may be, none of them is likely to be a monarchy. They may include monarchies, as England includes dukedoms. But they will be overriding alliances, not overriding rulers. I leave it to the mathematician to work out exactly how much the chances of conflict are diminished when there are practically only three Powers in the world instead of some scores. And these new Powers will be in certain respects unlike any existing European "States." None of the three Powers will be small ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... at him—nothing more. I wouldn't give much for his chance.' After a while Dare added musingly: 'You are a mathematician: did you ever investigate ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... his retiring temperament, Harper was aiming high. There was a standing award of $50,000 for the lucky mathematician who would solve the mystery of the "stress-barrier" encountered by skyscrapers as they were built up toward the 150 story mark. At this height, they encountered stress and strains which mathematical computations and engineering designs had ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... highly illustrious mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, whose system obtained respect and belief until the advent of Copernicus; the physician Galen; the philosopher-physician Sextus Empiricus, who was a good historian, highly sceptical, but well informed and intelligent about ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... went to college, prepared by Mr. Fielden, who was no ordinary scholar, and an accurate and profound mathematician,—a more important requisite than classical learning in a tutor for Cambridge. But Ardworth was idle, and perhaps even dissipated. He took a common degree, and made some debts, which were paid by Sir Miles without a murmur. A few letters then passed between ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imagination of the poet. It seems a pure 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and talents enabled him to do his part very well in Dr Johnson's company. He produced two epitaphs upon his father, the celebrated mathematician. 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, he wrote Ubi luctus regnant et ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... 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 whose sweet waters make men mad. Parnassus is but an Egyptian pyramid to be scaled ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... well as to men, and Barnard College, for women (see COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY), established immediately after his death, was named in his honour. He died in New York City on the 27th of April 1889. Barnard was a versatile man, of catholic training, a classical and English scholar, a mathematician, a physicist, and a chemist, a good public speaker, and a vigorous but somewhat prolix writer on various subjects, his annual reports to the Board of Trustees of Columbia being particularly valuable as discussions of educational problems. Besides being the editor-in-chief, in 1872, of Johnson's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of continued fractions is ascribed generally to Pietro Antonia Cataldi, an Italian mathematician who died in 1626. He used them to represent square roots, but only for particular numerical examples, and appears to have had no theory on the subject. A previous writer, Rafaello Bombelli, had used them in his treatise on Algebra (about 1579), and it is quite possible that Cataldi may have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • 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 that one shrinks into a sense of nothingness in contemplating it, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... a trial when the words were a little obscure. And though she had a wonderful knack of guessing at things, she surely was not born for a mathematician. He had a fine, quick mind in that respect. But the Latin was a delight to her and she delved away at the difficult parts for the sake of what she called the grand and beautiful sound. His rendering of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... which M. HAUeY forms his pupils, and there are a great number of them whose abilities would excite the pride of many a clear-sighted person. For instance, in addition to the before-mentioned LESUEUR, who is an excellent geographer and a good mathematician, might be quoted HUARD, a man of erudition and a correct printer; likewise CAILLAT, a capital performer on the violin, and a celebrated composer. For vocal and instrumental music, printing, and handicraft work, there might be noticed thirty or forty, as well ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... matter of national importance. Down to the early years of the thirteenth century a young English clerk who was anxious to study found his only career abroad, and was too often cut off altogether from his mother country. Among the last of this type were the Paris mathematician, John of Holywood or Halifax, Robert Curzon, cardinal, legate, theologian, and crusader, and Alexander of Hales. Stephen Langton, who did important work in revising the text of the Vulgate, might well have been one of those lost to England but for the wisdom of Innocent III who restored him, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... mob, headed by Peter the Reader, into the great church of Alexandria, and tortured to death on the steps of the high altar. Cyril's "hold upon the audiences of the giddy city [Alexandria] was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day, before her academy, stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... are found in all classes of society; no situation or position in life protects one from wild Utopia or frantic ambition. We find among the Jacobins a Barras and a Chateauneuf-Randon, two nobles of the oldest families; Condorcet, a marquis, mathematician, philosopher and member of two renowned academies; Gobel, bishop of Lydda and suffragan to the bishop of Bale; Herault de Sechellles, a protege of the Queen's and attorney-general to the Paris parliament; Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, chief-justice and one of the richest ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for knowledge and sagacity in his "Spirit of Laws" striking all the establishments of his country into contempt; and in his "Persian Letters," levelling the same blow at her morals. D'Alembert, the first mathematician of his day, an eloquent writer, the declared pupil of Voltaire, and, by his secretary-ship of the French academy, furnished with all the facilities for propagating his master's opinions. And Diderot, the projector and chief conductor ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... than a few credible persons, to have contrived for the late learned King James, a vessel to go under water; of which, trial was made in the Thames, with admired success, the vessel carrying twelve rowers, besides passengers; one which is yet alive, and related it to an excellent Mathematician that informed me of it. Now that for which I mention this story is, that having had the curiosity and opportunity to make particular inquiries among the relations of Drebel, and especially of an ingenious physician that married his ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... [Instruments] abacus, logometer[obs3], slide rule, slipstick[coll.], tallies, Napier's bones, calculating machine, difference engine, suan- pan[obs3]; adding machine; cash register; electronic calculator, calculator, computer; [people who calculate] arithmetician, calculator, abacist[obs3], 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... leniency, and were viewed with more curiosity than alarm. The juvenile criminal was regarded as a prodigy with a capacity for crimes far beyond his years. Something of the attitude obtained in regard to him which attaches to the child chess player or the child mathematician. The child criminal is now common, and for the most part is a product ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... his children were led by the Judge. It was very large and high, and full of windows. It was the brilliant light that struck the children first, accustomed as they had been to associate with the Sabbath worship, the dimness of their father's little chapel in Clayton. Norman the mathematician was immediately seized with a perverse desire to count the panes, and scandalised Graeme by communicating to her the result of his calculation, just as her father rose up ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... me,—said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,—what there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a mathematician or a metaphysician? ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said Sam in reply to a remark of Denison upon the subject. "And she has done as much for father. Our long winter nights we always spend in reading, music, and sometimes in such games as chess, backgammon, drafts, etc. Mother is a most splendid mathematician. She is also quite a linguist. But I am afraid that mother's days of teaching are over in this world. Dr. Jones is exceedingly kind, but do you really think that he has any hopes of curing her?" And the two sons looked anxiously into Denison's face ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... greater accuracy in diagnosis that it seems not inappropriate to talk of it as the first definite attempt at laboratory methods in the department of medicine. The maker of the suggestion, curiously enough, was not a practising physician, but a mathematician and scholar, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who is known in history as Cusanus from the Latin name of the town Cues on the Moselle River, some twenty-five miles south of Treves, where he was born. His ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... 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 truth, in ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... now in the United States a Negro, the son of a black man born in Africa and a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable mathematician. I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new Federal City on the Potomac and in the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own handwriting, and which I enclose to you. I have seen very ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... Bryant say, that Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? [Would that this was so:—error, superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is a mark ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the leading Englishmen declared against Luther. Cuthbert Tunstall, a mathematician and diplomatist, and later Bishop of London, wrote Wolsey from Worms of the devotion of the Germans to their leader, and sent to him The Babylonian Captivity with the comment, "there is much strange opinion in it near to the opinions of Boheme; I pray God keep that book out of England." [Sidenote: ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... such a prophet. One cannot imagine when he could make such calculations," said the best mathematician in the ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... 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 ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... made it your business to search, you would not find such another. You only sent for a barber; but here, in my person, you have the best barber in Bagdad, an experienced physician, a profound chemist, an infallible astrologer, a finished grammarian, a complete orator, a subtle logician, a mathematician perfectly well versed in geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and all the refinements of algebra; an historian fully master of the histories of all the kingdoms of the universe. Besides, I understand all parts of philosophy. I have all our sacred traditions by heart. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... through me bein' edicated. Most any one can read print words, if they're of a reasonable size,—the words I mean,—but I could read handwritin' too. I never was no great mathematician when you got above fractions, an' I was some particular in what I read; but if I 'd been minded that way, I reckon I could have waded through purty much any kind of a book ever was written. At that time, however, I was still middlin' young in some things, an' ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... that the party had been larger. They were only a dozen all told: Mr. Carruthers, the squire of Little Deeping, the vicar and his wife, the higher mathematician, father of Wiggins, Mrs. Blenkinsop and Mrs. Morton, and Wiggins himself, who had spent most of the afternoon with Erebus. Captain Baster would have preferred thirty or forty, but none the less he fell to work with ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... of 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 World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the unlimited ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... of you who is an astronomer come forward.' So the astronomer came forward and sat down before her. When she saw him, she laughed and said, 'Art thou the astronomer, the mathematician, the scribe?' 'Yes,' answered he. 'Ask of what thou wilt,' quoth she; 'success rests with God.' So he said, 'Tell me of the sun and its rising and setting?' And she replied, 'The sun rises in the Eastern hemisphere and sets in the Western, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... gentleman compares Newton with Spinoza. In the first place, there is no ground of parallel. Newton was a very great man and a very justly celebrated mathematician. As a matter of fact, he is not celebrated for having discovered the law of gravitation. That was known for thousands of years before he was born; and if the reverend gentleman would read a little more he would find that ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the company started up in fresh alarm, Pappus, the mathematician, cried out: "The conflagration has begun! Flame and fire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... conversed with her even than when I held her in my arms. She had read much, she had great tact, and her taste was naturally excellent; her judgment was sane, and, without being learned, she could argue like a mathematician, easily and without pretension, and in everything she had that natural grace which is so charming. She never tried to be witty when she said something of importance, but accompanied her words with a smile which imparted to them ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... at first sight surprising that a brother and a sister should each have the same average number of brothers. It puzzled me until I had thought the matter out, and when the results were published in "Nature," it also seems to have puzzled an able mathematician, and gave rise to some newspaper controversy, which need not be recapitulated. The essence of the problem is that the sex of one child is supposed to give no clue of any practical importance to that of any other child ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist, and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge. What then ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... A mathematician should not want breathing time! Come, multiply the surface by the third of the radius. ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... right from the start of the reorganization of Project Grudge that there would be questions that no one on my staff was technically competent to answer. To have a fully staffed project, I'd need an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a mathematician, a psychologist, and probably a dozen other specialists. It was, of course, impossible to have all of these people on my staff, so I decided to do the next best thing. I would set up a contract with some research organization who already had such people ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... make a physician worth anything. There must be an instinct that recognizes a disease and suggests its remedy, as much as an instinct that finds the right notes and harmonies for a composer of music, or the colors for a true artist's picture, or the results of figures for a mathematician. Men and women may learn these callings from others; may practice all the combinations until they can carry them through with a greater or less degree of unconsciousness of brain and fingers; but there is something needed beside even drill and experience; ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Bartholomew and the Inquisition, and then deny by material philosophy the possibility of even a Calvinistic hell; deny the personality of man because your microscope and scalpel can not find a soul by dissecting the brain of the mathematician, and then deny a personal God because his spirit eludes the grasp of sealed crucibles and can not be detected by digging in the earth with the spade. Deny the existence of conscious life, and then ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... unfavourable view of Wilkins' character, and uses about him the politest language at his command. "He was a person of rare gifts, a noted theologist and preacher; a curious critick in several matters; an excellent mathematician and experimentalist, &c.; and I cannot say that there was anything deficient in him but a constant ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... free of mountains and waste places, he had demonstrated that there would be an acre and a quarter of ground for each Saint that had ever lived from the morning of creation to the day of doom. And, lest some carping mathematician should dispute his figures, he had declared that if, by any miscalculation, the earth's surface should not suffice for the Saints and their Gentile slaves, the Lord "would build a gallery around the earth." Thus had ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... better writer than reader."—W. Allen. "He was an abler mathematician than linguist."—Id. "I should rather have an orange than an apple."—G. Brown. "He was no less able as a negotiator, than courageous as a warrior."—Smollett cor. "In an epic poem, we pardon many negligences that would not be permitted in a sonnet ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... believe, and but for the irrefutable records of the Court, few would credit the fact that every one of these letters was in the French language! And the dupe a highly educated mathematician of European repute. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... heat of the sun, our mathematician contrived to deliver himself in a tolerable state of preservation at the mansion of Sir John Steventon. We pass over the ceremony of dinner, and draw up the curtain just at that time when the ladies and gentlemen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... parallel:—forbids it with a positiveness strong and decided just in proportion as this parallel has already been long-drawn and exact. This is one of those anomalous propositions which, seemingly appealing to thought altogether apart from the mathematical, is yet one which only the mathematician can fully entertain. Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... all the years of life leaned upon him. His genius too was a fountain inexhaustible of thoughts and kept me ever curious and expectant. Nothing was too great, nothing too beautiful for his grasp or his expression, and as brilliant as his power of illustration was, he stuck like a mathematician to his truth and never added a syllable for display. I cannot tell you how much I have valued his conversation for these last two or three years, and he has never stopped growing, but has ripened from month to month. Indeed, the weight of his thoughts ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... all, turn your face homeward, and progress as a pig does into a steamer, by going the opposite way? Were you ever condemned to spin ropes of sand to all eternity, like Tregeagle the wrecker; or to extract the cube roots of a million or two of hopeless surds, like the mad mathematician; or last, and worst of all, to work the Nuisances Removal Act? Then you can enter, as a man and a brother, into the sorrows of Tom Thurnall, in the months ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Americans about him, with their own sneers and shoulder-shrugs, showed him how such folk were unworthy genteel countenance. They looked down upon Richard, Storri looked down upon them; the greater included the less, and deductions were easy. Storri arrived at a most happy contempt of Richard as a mathematician gets to the solution of a problem, and, being mercurial, not thoughtful, arranged with himself that Richard was ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... 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 three years ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... together, and the people here, as every where, fond of the marvellous, affirm that they were the best beaters up of game in the whole country. The every way amiable and estimable John Gough of Kendal is not only an excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist. He has frequently at the first feel corrected the mistakes of the most experienced sportsman with regard to the birds or vermin which they had killed, when ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Pekin], where the king resides, and in Lanquien [i.e., Nankin] the fathers of the Society enjoy the quiet possession of three houses. There are seven fathers, among whom is one called Father Ricio, [114] an associate of Father Rugero who went to Roma. He is an excellent mathematician and has corrected the Chinese calendar which contained many errors and false opinions, and their fantastic idea of the world, which they believed to be flat. He made them a globe and a sphere, and with this and the sound arguments and reasons which they give them, the fathers ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical fabrics of the old world, has some reason in common experience. Every man,—mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant,—looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. "Take a thorn-bush," said the emir Abdel-Kader, "and sprinkle it for a whole ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... linkage excited a flurry of interest, and variations of it occupied mathematical minds for several years. For at least 10 years before and 20 years after the final solution of the problem, Professor Chebyshev,[36] a noted mathematician of the University of St. Petersburg, was interested in the matter. Judging by his published works and his reputation abroad, Chebyshev's ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... Nash with Mendoza, and thus to point at Spain as the parent, not only of the euphuistic, but also of the pastoral and picaresque romance, is to furnish an explanation almost irresistible in its symmetry. It must have been with the joy of a mathematician, solving an intricate problem, that Dr Landmann formulated this theory of literary equations. But without going to such lengths, without pressing the connexion between particular writers, one may admit that in general Spanish literature must have exercised an influence ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... men amongst the Greeks and other nations had occupied themselves to ascertain and measure its proportions, he said it had never hitherto been regarded as a body, to be anatomized or explored in its internal parts. Some years ago, it had occurred to a French mathematician that the cube was divisible into six pyramidical forms; and it therefore had struck him, the inventor, that the natural formation of that figure was by a combination of those forms. Having detailed to his audience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... be realized only in logical concepts, as an actually occurring process, and of confounding an abstract operation with concrete fact. "The logical transformation of the concept ape into the concept man is no genealogical process." The mathematician may logically 'develop' the concept of a circle from that of a polygon, but it by no means follows that the circle is phylo-genetically derived ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... experienced than those we are acquainted with here. It is not vulgar curiosity or idle fancy that suggests the possibilities of life in other worlds. It has been the conviction of the profoundest thinkers, of men of highest imagination. The mystery of the star-depths has had its charm for the mathematician as well as for the poet; for the exact observer as for the most fruitful theoriser; nay, for the man of business as for him whose life is passed in communing with nature. If we analyse the interest with which the generality of men inquire into astronomical ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... at all events," exclaimed Waymark. "I detest the very name of Parliament, and could as soon read Todhunter on Conic Sections as the reports of a debate. Perhaps you're a mathematician?" This ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... mathematician, who was born in Alexandria, in Egypt, about two hundred and eighty years before Christ. He distinguished himself by his writings on music and geometry. The most celebrated of his works is his Elements of Geometry, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Colson[302], an eminent mathematician and master of an academy, by the following ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... A similar step had been taken by the Ashikaga shogun, Yoshiteru, in 1553, but the processes adopted on that occasion were not by any means so accurate or scientific as those prescribed by the Taiko. The latter entrusted the work of survey to Nazuka Masaiye, with whom was associated the best mathematician of the era, Zejobo, and it is recorded that owing to the minute measures pursued by these surveyors and to the system of taking two-thirds of the produce for the landlord instead of one-half or even ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi |
