"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... elementary field. So much I admit; but I say also, that the case arises out of a great dilemma, with difficulties on both sides; and that, in all practical applications of philosophy, amongst materials so imperfect as men, just as in all attempts to realize the rigour of mathematical laws amongst earthly mechanics, inevitably there will arise such dilemmas and cases of opprobrium to the reflecting intellect. However, in conclusion, I shall say four things, which I request my opponent, whoever ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of mathematical, musical, and artistic prodigies and somnambulists with prophetic gifts, who nevertheless appear to be perfectly imbecile apart from their special talents, are interesting examples of the transition from madness to genius. The solving of equations of ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... is in the Berlin Museum. He made exact studies of the body in action, and gave new importance to the reproduction of the veins and muscles. It is also claimed that Pythagoras was the first to lay down clearly the laws of symmetry or proportion which is governed by strict mathematical rules. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... for the matter of that, Frenchwomen—may count with mathematical certainty upon the compensation of earthly ills: they are sure of their statue ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... chapter 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, and must not, if you draw countries on the unsplit skin, stretch ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... one rather regrets the disappearance in 1876 of the old mansion house of the Carpenters, which survived the Great Fire and recalled many memories of the past. In order to "seek for and destroy faulty and deceitful work of clock and watchmakers or mathematical instrument makers," the Clockmakers' Company was formed in 1631. Some of the members wanted a hall, and objected to meet "in alehouses and taverns to the great disparagement of them all"; but this dream has not been realised, and the company use the halls of other guilds. The Coach and Coach-Harness ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping beaches or around jagged rocks. These birds are one with the sea, knowing no fear of that protean monster ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... a bunch of sweet herbs, covered deep with cold water, and set at one side of the range on washing-day, to simmer into soup stock, wastes neither time nor fuel and will be the base of more than one or two nourishing dinners; prove, by mathematical demonstration, that a mold of delicious blanc-mange or Spanish cream or simpler junket costs less and can be made in one-tenth of the time required for the leathery-skinned, sour or faint-hearted pie, without which "father'n the boys wouldn't relish their dinner;" that ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... has, however, made a general attempt in this direction. Theorie des Werthes (Dorpat, 1852). But says Th. Fix (Journal des Economistes, 1844, IX, 12): "It is as impossible to establish a scale of values, as it is to find an exact mathematical and permanent measure of our wants, passions, desires, tastes ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... his throat, hold his teeth hard together, and contract nobody knows how many more muscles in his body, burning and wasting fuel in a hundred or more places where it should be saved. This is not concentration. Concentration means the focussing of a force; and when the mathematical faculty of the brain alone should be at work, the force is not focussed if it is at the same time flying over all other parts of the body in useless strain of innumerable muscles. Tell another man, one who works naturally, to solve the same problem,—he will instinctively ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... Another is the "Feathered Star," whose lightness and delicacy make it a most charming pattern. The pieced quilt with one large star in the centre, called by some "The Star of the East" and by others "The Star of Bethlehem," is a striking example of mathematical exactness in quilt piecing. In quilts made after this pattern all the pieces must be exactly the same size and all the seams must be the same width in order ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... mathematical exercise concerning the form and dimensions of the ark is here presented. The views of writers vary. Some claim it was four-cornered, others that it was gabled like nearly all our structures in Europe. As for ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... arrangements? Never; so I'll tell you. Why, she instructs two nieces and a nephew (things of twelve or thirteen) in astronomy, natural philosophy, and principles of botany! Her boudoir has globes, several mathematical instruments, &c. All this I discovered by accident; for she denies it all most strenuously, and with some pretty, unaffected embarrassment. Be assured this is an amiable, sensible girl. I don't believe you know her value: so I pray you to study her. She left town yesterday with her mother ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the one chance of redemption; and to that event he looked as to a figure in a mathematical proposition. Of this girl herself, with all her wealth of beauty and goodness, of hope and love, he had scarcely any definite idea. She had so long been no more to him than an important figure in the mathematics of his life, that he had lost the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... freely grant you that this is no mathematical demonstration. Natural science does not deal in demonstrations, it rests upon the doctrine of probabilities; just as we have to order our whole lives according to this doctrine. Its solution of a problem is never the only conceivable answer, but the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... headed two points farther off. This done, he went below, and shaking his barometer several times, found it had begun to fall very fast. Taking down his coast-chart, he consulted it very studiously for nearly half an hour, laying off an angle with a pair of dividers and scale, with mathematical minuteness; after which he pricked his course along the surface to a given point. This was ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Thirty Kalas, with the tenth part of a Kala added, make what is known as a Muhurta. Thirty Muhurtas make up one day and night. Thirty days and nights are called a month, and twelve months are called a year. Persons conversant with mathematical science say that a year is made up of two ayanas (dependent on sun's motion), viz., the northern and the southern. The sun makes the day and the night for the world of man. The night is for the sleep of all living creatures, and the day is for the doing of action. A month of human ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... integraph must not have a greater maximum error than 2 per cent. The mathematical calculations, which are correct to five or six places of decimals, are only a source of danger to the practical calculator of stresses and strains. They tend to disguise the important fact that he cannot possibly know the properties of the material ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... research 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
... of fancy which had shown him with all the force of mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... text-book, of the national anthem, of an orange, of the schoolroom, and so on, would all be object images. A word or abstract image is one which is a symbol. It stands for and represents certain sensory experiences, the quality of which does not appear in the image. Any word, number, mathematical or chemical symbol—in fact, any abstract symbol will come under this type of image. If in the first list of illustrations, instead of having images of the real objects, an individual had images of words in each case, the images would be abstract or verbal images. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... (for boys only), or from public elementary schools in London, certain city parishes and certain endowed schools elsewhere. The main school is divided into two parts—the Latin school, corresponding to the classical side in other schools, and the mathematical school or modern side. Large pension charities are administered by the governing body, and part of the income of the hospital (about L60,000 annually) is devoted to apprenticing boys and girls, to leaving exhibitions from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... was made on the second day, not that in which the stars are set, but the part of the atmosphere where the clouds are collected, and which has received the name firmament from the firmness and density of the air. "For a body is called firm," that is dense and solid, "thereby differing from a mathematical body" as is remarked by Basil (Hom. iii in Hexaem.). If, then, this explanation is adopted none of these opinions will be found repugnant to reason. Augustine, in fact (Gen. ad lit. ii, 4), recommends it thus: "I consider this view of the question worthy of all commendation, as neither contrary ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... reader, and, speaking for myself, I am free to confess that I have seldom been able to feel any absorbing interest in characters who figure merely as the M. or N. of the baptismal service. I shall therefore assign fictitious names to persons and places, and I cannot even pretend to mathematical exactness as to one or two minor details. In reporting conversations, for instance, I do not profess to reproduce the ipsissima verba of the speakers, but merely to give the effect and purport of their discourses. I have, however, ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. With what favor would the guardians of those marbles, or any other persons interested in Greek art, receive a proposal from a living sculptor to "reproduce with mathematical exactitude" the group of the Fates, in a perfect form, and to destroy the original? For with exactly such favor, those who are interested in Gothic art should receive proposals to reproduce the sculpture of Chartres ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... scholars, male and female, from the infant learning the A B C's up to the young lady of eighteen and the boy of twenty, studying the highest branches taught—the three R's, "Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic." I never saw an algebra, or other mathematical work higher than the arithmetic, in Georgetown, until after I was appointed to West Point. I then bought a work on algebra in Cincinnati; but having no teacher it was Greek ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the meanes for want of utterance in their language to expresse." So Heriot could not be subtle in the native tongue. Heriot did what he could to convert them: "I did my best to make His immortall glory knowne". His efforts were chiefly successful by virtue of the savage admiration of our guns, mathematical instruments, and so forth. These sources of an awakened interest in Christianity would vanish with the total destruction and discomfiture of the colony, unless a few captives, later massacred, taught our religion to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... certain unfortunate differences, however, which in fairness we must here clearly point out. Lana proclaimed his speculations standing on a giant's shoulders. Torricelli, with his closed bent tube, had just shown the world how heavily the air lies above us. It then required little mathematical skill to calculate what would be the lifting power of any vessel void of air on the earth's surface. Thus Lana proposed the construction of an air ship which possibly because of its picturesquesness has won him notoriety. But it was a fraud. We have but to conceive a dainty boat in which ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... is assigned to geometry; on the usefulness of which it is unnecessary to expatiate in an age when mathematical studies have so much engaged the attention of all classes of men. This treatise is one of those which have been borrowed, being a translation from the work of Mr. Le Clerc; and is not intended as ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... eagerness, and, on the part of Robert, what alternations of hope and fear! And Shargar was always the reflex of Robert, so far as Shargar could reflect Robert. Sometimes Robert would stop, stand still in the middle of the room, cast a mathematical glance of survey over its cubic contents, and then dart off in another inwardly suggested direction of search. Shargar, on the other hand, appeared to rummage blindly without a notion of casting the illumination ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... reclaim'd: For still, by a dire Mistake, conducted by vast Opiniatrety, and a greater Portion of Self-love, than the rest of the Race of Man, he believes that Affectation in his Mein and Dress, that Mathematical Movement, that Formality in every Action, that a Face manag'd with Care, and soften'd into Ridicule, the languishing Turn, the Toss, and the Back-shake of the Periwig, is the direct Way to the Heart of the fine Person he adores; and instead of curing Love ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... failure of a considerable percentage of adults to pass the test. Visual imagery, however, is not absolutely necessary to success. One 8-year-old prodigy, who had 12-year intelligence, arrived in forty seconds at a strictly mathematical solution for the second problem, as follows: "If it is 2.46, and the hands trade places, then the little hand has gone about one fourth of the distance from 9 o'clock to 10 o'clock. One fourth of 60 minutes is 15 minutes, and so the time would be 15 minutes after 9 o'clock." ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... were under the especial charge of Alfred Russel Wallace; Cromwell Varley, chief of Electrical Engineers and Telegraphers; and Professor Morgan, president of the Mathematical Society. This committee, after careful investigation, reported voluminously to this effect: 'The phenomena exist.... There is a force capable of moving heavy bodies without material contact, which force is in some unknown way dependent upon ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... acquiring by his judgment, and treasuring in his memory, that wonderful process of almost unlimited combination, by means of which he was afterwards able to simplify the most difficult and complicated undertakings. His mathematical teacher was proud of the young islander, as the boast of his school, and his other scientific instructors had the same ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... overstep the limits of the Empire, and not only to carry its trade there, but to form settlements in other countries beyond the sphere of a regularly organized Government, and there to constitute a civil Government of their own. Let the Government adopt, with mathematical rigour if you like, an opposition to annexation, and what does it effect? It does nothing to check that tendency—that perhaps irresistible tendency—of British enterprise to carry your commerce, and to carry the range and area of your settlement beyond ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... 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
... that is simply astounding to men of common sense. The diamond hers, indeed! Although I have been so successful so far, there is as much difference between what I have done and what has yet to be done as there is between the simple alphabet and a mathematical theorem. To-morrow's post ought to bring me ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... of woman's influence in music are to be drawn from the Hindoo mythology.[1] According to the tabular schedule of all knowledge, found in the ancient Brahmin records, music as an art belongs in the second chief division of lesser sciences, but on its mathematical and philosophical side it is accorded a much higher position, and is treated of in the oldest and most sacred Hindoo work, the Veda. This authority tells us that when Brahma had lain in the original egg some thousand ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... masterpieces of French and Italian literature, and a marked predilection for music, which is greatly cultivated, and which (as always results from a taste for the fine arts) brings the different classes of society nearer to each other. The mathematical sciences, drawing, and painting, cannot here boast of any of those establishments with which royal munificence and the patriotic zeal of the inhabitants have enriched Mexico. In the midst of the marvels of nature, so rich in interesting productions, it is strange that we found no person ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... railway passes from Derry to Omagh is one long stretch of beauty, fertility and careful tillage. Every field, whatever its shape, is cultivated up to the fence and into the corners with a mathematical nicety. The regular fields, the green separating ditches with their grassy covering, the hills cultivated to the very tops, and the trees growing here and there all over made a landscape that should delight the ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... his friends entertained on his account. The Prince smiled disdainfully, saying these fears were the effect of plebeian timidity. The mistress understood nothing of great speculations, and Cayrol was a narrow-minded banker! He knew what he was doing. The results of his speculations were mathematical. So far they had not disappointed his hopes. The great Universal Credit Company, of which he was going to be a director, would bring him in such an immense fortune that he would be independent of ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope. Still less, as he would admit, could he follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene. Some apes, however, would probably declare that they could and did admire the beauty of the coloured skin and fur of their partners in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... are already astonishing, there is no doubt but great improvements are still to be made. Our present mode of writing in these, as in literature, belongs to the second or alphabetical stage of the graphic art. The ten ciphers, and the other signs used in the mathematical sciences, form the alphabet in which the language of those sciences is written. The few musical notes, and the other signs which accompany them, furnish an alphabet for ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... picture, and on this!—the one, refined, delicate, sensitive, fastidious, severe, never repeated; the other, thoughtless, vulgar, mathematical, common-sense, sensuous, reappearing ever with a stolid monotony. And such is the sentiment pervading all Roman Art. The conquerors took the letter from the Greeks, but never had the slightest feeling for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... would have merely wondered why people could not hold their tongues and mind their business: and yet he is a model citizen, and would be deeply annoyed if he were told he were not a sincere Christian. He accepts doctrinal statements as he would accept mathematical formulae, and he takes exactly as much of the Christian doctrine as suits him. Now when I compare myself with the miller, I feel that, as far as human usefulness goes, I am far lower in the scale. I am, when all is said and done, a drone in the hive, eating the honey I did not make. I do not take ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... It is, however, of great importance for one to be able to determine at a glance, within about one contour interval, whether or not such and such a point is visible; or whether a given road is generally visible to a certain scout, etc. For this reason no effort is made to give an exact mathematical solution of problems in visibility further than would be useful in practical work with a map in the solution of ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... against even suspicion," he remarked. "She was a large, placid 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, has an ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Philosopher: He gave the how, the modus of all the secret Operations of Nature; and told us, how Sensation is convey'd to and from the Brain; why Respiration preserves Life; and how Locomotion is directed to, as well as perform'd by the Parts. There are some Anatomical Dissections of Thought, and a Mathematical Description of Nature's strong Box, the Memory, with all ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... warp more or less in cooling, there is a great deal of fitting afterward required, to make them come rightly together. This could easily be done by machinery if the surfaces were square, or cylindrical, or of any other mathematical form to which the working of machinery could be adapted. But the curved and winding surfaces which form the hull of a boat or vessel, smooth and flowing as they are, and controlled, too, by established and well-known laws, bid defiance ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... consciousness, been solving the difficulties. This experience is by no means a peculiar one. Many scientific workers have borne testimony to a similar habit of the cerebrum. The late Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, the discoverer of the mathematical method known as that of the quaternions, states that his mind suddenly solved that problem after long work when he was thinking of something else. He says in one place: "Tomorrow will be the fifteenth birthday of the quaternions. They started into life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... and containing more stress. The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle, but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence, it is constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface to his "Poems", Henley speaks of "those unrhyming rhythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme." The desire to "quintessentialize", to ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... the discharge of his municipal duties. His mother, a charming woman, whose memory a few old men of the neighbourhood still cherished fondly, had died at twenty; she had left him her fine eyes, full of gentleness and passion, her pallor and timidity. From his father, optician and mathematical instrument maker to the King, carried off by the same complaint before his thirtieth year, he inherited an upright ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... the basis of deductive reasoning may be taken from various sources. Sometimes the truth is self-evident or intuitive, as the axioms that lie at the basis of mathematical reasoning. Sometimes they are truths arrived at by inductive processes. Sometimes they are maxims that have gained the assent of mankind; and again, they are the statements of an accepted philosophy, creed, code, or other ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... 'I reckon it's a simple calculation, and you can't deny it any more than a mathematical law. Russia is counted out. The Boche won't get food from her for a good many months, but he can get more men, and he's got them. He's fighting only on one foot, and he's been able to bring troops and guns west so he's as strong as the Allies now on paper. And he's stronger in reality. He's got better ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Middle Ages, by the nominalists, realists, and conceptualists, in their disputes. With Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of inventive methods. Kant called attention to a priori syntheses. The absolute idealists despised the Aristotelian logic. The followers of Herbart, bound to Aristotle, on the other hand, set in relief ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... 1868 to 1878 he attended the Lycee Fontaine, now known as the Lycee Condorcet. While there he obtained a prize for his scientific work and also won a prize when he was eighteen for the solution of a mathematical problem. This was in 1877, and his solution was published the following year in Annales de Mathematiques. It is of interest as being his first published work. After some hesitation over his career, as to whether it should lie in the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... unfortunately I could not learn to whose memory it was erected, or to what age it belonged. It consists of a high building, resembling a tower with twelve angles; the walls between the angles are covered, from top to bottom, with the most artistic mathematical figures in triangles and sexagons, and some places are inlaid with glazed tiles. The monument is surrounded by a wall, forming a small court-yard; at the entrance-gates stand half-ruined ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death. Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... muskets, would have killed, at the outside, only a little over a half of another Boer. This would not have saved the day. It would not even have seriously affected the general result. The figures show clearly, and with mathematical violence, that the only way to save Jameson, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy, was for Johannesburg to send him 240 Maxims, 90 cannon, 600 carloads of ammunition, and 240,000 men. Johannesburg was not in a position to do this. Johannesburg has been called ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... marked aptitude for classical work, and success in the great public examinations may be predicted for him with absolute confidence." "Painstaking and anxious to do well, but rather slow," was the verdict of his mathematical teacher. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... at the end of the second date ({.}), which seems to tie the twelfth year of E-he to Keah-yin, as another designation of it. The "year-star" is the planet Jupiter, the revolution of which, in twelve years, constitutes "a great year." Whether it would be possible to fix exactly by mathematical calculation in what year Jupiter was in the Chinese zodiacal sign embracing part of both Virgo and Scorpio, and thereby help to solve the difficulty of the passage, I do not know, and in the meantime must leave that difficulty ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... 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 because she cannot believe ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... share in the present stage of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement of the science? Two women, since political economy has ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... of my readers are no doubt aware, elephants are employed to pile timber in the Government yards, in other words, to arrange the logs one above another, and at equal distances from each other. This they are soon trained to carry out with mathematical accuracy, and all that the mahout requires to do is to rest himself comfortably on some adjacent log and look on, cheering the elephant with his presence, and perhaps throwing in an occasional remark. But sometimes the mahout ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... ever: mamma is only afraid of her overworking herself, but she never allows that she is tired. She goes to school three days in the week, besides walking to East-hill on Thursday, to help in the singing; and she is getting dreadfully learned. Guy gave her his old mathematical books, and Charlie always calls her ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Parliament. (What would Mr. Holyoake say to me if he knew that I have never voted for anybody in my life, and never mean to do so!) I am essentially a painter and a leaf dissector; and my powers of thought are all purely mathematical, seizing ultimate principles only—never accidents; a line is always, to me, length without breadth; it is not a cable or a crowbar; and though I can almost infallibly reason out the final law of anything, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... of ultimate rupture due to torsion appear not to be governed by definite mathematical laws; but where the material is not overstrained, laws may be assumed which are sufficiently exact for practical cases. The formulae commonly used for computations are ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... of that thing—i.e., the soul—He desired most in him; and whose very last words were an echo of Job's curse upon the day that he was born. Marie's phrases may be regarded, perhaps, as a courtly flourish, rather than as conveying truth with mathematical precision. If not, we should be driven to suggest an alternative to the favourite simile of lying like an epitaph. But I think it unlikely that Marie suffered with a morbidly sensitive conscience. There is little enough real ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and natural objects, to flowers and trees and pleasant landscapes, to everything, in short, which delighted the Italians of that period, is a main characteristic of his art. This abstraction and aridity, this ascetic devotion of his genius to pure ideal form, this almost mathematical conception of beauty, may be ascribed, I think, to the same psychological qualities which determined the dreary conditions of his home-life. He was no niggard either of money or of ideas; nay, even profligate of both. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... coincides precisely with his theological view, and is generally expressed in theological language. The love of 'Being in general' is the love of God. The intellectual intuition is the reflection of the inward light, and the recognition of a mathematical truth is but a different phase of the process which elsewhere produces conversion. Intuition is a kind of revelation and revelation ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... inventions, however, that apply almost wholly to a certain section of the country, while still others apply more to one section than to another; thus, for instance, mechanical contrivances of the higher order, such as writing machines, mathematical instruments, etc., the North and East are the most valuable; for mining and agricultural implements, etc., the West; while such as the cotton-gin, seeders, and presses apply almost wholly to the South. States and ...
— Practical Pointers for Patentees • Franklin Cresee
... suggested that he named his hero after John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who, among other curious theories, had seriously discussed the question whether men could acquire the art of flying. In the second part of his "Mathematical Magick," the Bishop writes: "Those things that seem very difficult and fearfull at the first may grow very facil after frequent trial and exercise: And therefore he that would effect any thing in this kind must be brought up to the constant practice of it from his Youth; trying first only to use ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... discharge of the cannon an observation was taken by one of the scientific men, which accurately determined the distance to the object to be aimed at, and reference to a carefully prepared mathematical table showed to what points on the graduated scales the gun should be adjusted, and the instant that the that the muzzle of the cannon was in the position that it was when the observation was taken, a button was touched and the bomb was instantaneously placed on the spot aimed at. ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... to win, but—but I was a little nervous; I see, however, that you would have defeated me though I had been in my best form." Gwen gave him one of those short, searching looks, so peculiarly her own, which seem to read, with mathematical certainty, one's innermost thoughts,—and the poor fellow blushed to the tips of his ears. —But he was no boy, this Maitland, and betrayed no other sign of the tempest that was raging within him. His utterance remained as usual, deliberate ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... fortunately tried some of the mystical poetry of the seventeenth century. The difficulties of that I found rather stimulate than repel me; while, much as there was in the form to displease the taste, there was more in the matter to rouse the intellect. I found also some relief in resuming my mathematical studies: the abstraction of them acted as an anodyne. But the ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... holding his own; he was a good mathematical scholar, he prepared the lessons thoroughly, and he found it generally easy to keep order by assigning problems to be worked out in class. The weather continued good, so that during play time the fellows were out of doors instead of loafing ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... therefore, how, from the commencement, the absolute, the mathematical as it is called, nowhere finds any sure basis in the calculations in the Art of War; and that from the outset there is a play of possibilities, probabilities, good and bad luck, which spreads about with all the coarse and fine threads of its web, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... been able to suggest so many comforts and conveniences, and so to revise these plans that, at first in a desultory way, later in real earnest, she had begun to draw plans for houses. Then, being of methodical habit and mathematical mind, she began scaling up the plans and figuring on the cost of building, and so she had worked until she felt that she was evolving homes that could be built for the same amount of money and lived in with more comfort and convenience than the homes that many of ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... unrecognized fear—he said it was philosophic interest—which had attracted him to study the various theories of heredity. He had been particularly impressed by Mendel's "Principles of Inheritance," and its graphic elucidation of the mathematical recurrence of the dominant characteristics had grasped him as a fetish. With such forebears as his, there was no hope. The die had been cast before he was born. Why struggle against the laws of determinism? He ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... country. That other Frenchman with the unusual gold shoulder straps is not a member of the French army. He is a naval officer, and the daring with which he carried his mapping chart along exposed portions of the line at Verdun and evolved the mathematical data on which the French fired their guns against the German waves has been the pride of both ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... sold his garage, by mail, to Ben Sittka and Heinie Rauskukle. He had enough money to get through two years, with economy. His life was as simple and dull as it had been in Schoenstrom. He studied while he cooked his scrappy meals; he pinned mathematical formulae and mechanical diagrams on the wall, and pored over them while he was dressing—or while he was trying to break in the new shoes, which were ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... French geometers, Lagrange and Laplace, made an epoch in astronomical science. Since their time, however, there has been a large increase of knowledge in this branch. The discovery of the planet Neptune (1846) by Galle, as the result of mathematical calculations of Leverrier, which were made independently also by Adams, was hailed as a signal proof of scientific progress; and, recently, the discovery of a fifth satellite of Jupiter. Besides Neptune hundreds ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... method. History of the method. Its character and affinities. How it contrasts with rationalism and intellectualism. A 'corridor theory.' Pragmatism as a theory of truth, equivalent to 'humanism.' Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and natural truth. More recent views. Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental' view. The formation of new beliefs. Older truth always has to be kept account of. Older truth arose similarly. The 'humanistic' doctrine. Rationalistic criticisms of it. Pragmatism ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... about 300 B.C., and is described by a Greek writer of the first century B.C. as possessing a regular plan and roads crossing at right angles. The actual remains of the site, explored in part by English and French archaeologists early in the nineteenth century, show some streets which run with mathematical straightness from north-east to south-west and others which run from north-west to south-east.[31] These streets might, indeed, date from the period when Sicyon was the chief town of the Roman province ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... one will admit any charge sooner than that of ignorance; but the Dutchman considered lying one of the meanest vices of which a man can be guilty. Like all of his countrymen, he had received a good school education at home, besides which his mind possessed a natural mathematical bent. He said he caught the answer to the question the minute it was asked him, and, although Mr. Layton may not have seen it before, Mr. Ribsam had met and conquered similar ones when ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... dead intellectual assent. It enables one, first, to assign something like its true magnitude to a rock or snow-slope; and, secondly, to measure that magnitude in terms of muscular exertion instead of bare mathematical units. Suppose that we are standing upon the Wengern Alp; between the Moench and the Eiger there stretches a round white bank, with a curved outline, which we may roughly compare to the back of one of Sir E. Landseer's lions. The ordinary tourists—the old ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... shade, "is because no natural law is broken. On earth one man can learn a handicraft better in a few days than another in a month, while some can solve with ease a mathematical problem that others could never grasp. So it is here. Perhaps I was in a favourable frame of mind on dying, for the so-called supernatural always interested me on earth, or I had a natural aptitude for these things; for soon after ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... who had become estranged through events which occurred during the Revolution.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, 1 252.) He was therefore on good terms with this learned body, and was himself a member of that division of it which was devoted to the physical and mathematical sciences.* (* Thibaudeau (English edition) ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... certain fixed laws which we have no power to alter. Therefore we are confronted at the outset by a broad distinction between two modes of Motion—the Movement of Thought and the Movement of Cosmic Energy—the one based upon the exercise of Consciousness and Will, and the other based upon Mathematical Sequence. This is why that system of instruction known as Free Masonry starts by erecting the two symbolic pillars Jachin and Boaz—Jachin so called from the root "Yak" meaning "One," indicating the Mathematical element of Law; and Boaz, from the root "Awaz" ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... the measure of reliance that the French General Staff and General Michel placed on the Namur forts, evidently General von Buelow regarded them as little more than passing targets for his siege guns. He seemed to have made a comparatively simple mathematical calculation of almost the number of shells necessary to fire, and the hours to be consumed in reducing the Namur ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... that is unnecessary. The theory of the fourth order is not really theory at all—it is mathematical fact. Although we have never been able to generate them, we know exactly the forces you use in your ship of space, and we can tell you of some thousands of others more or less similar and also highly ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... like. We'll stay here. Mrs. Owen,—the thicker the merrier." But Elsley had vanished into a chamber bestrewn with plaids, pipes, hob-nail boots, fishing-tackle, mathematical books, scraps of ore, and the wild confusion of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... again. There are certain emotions, certain wants, you can't suppress by logic. Even a dog, if you imprison him alone, will go mad in time. I'm a living man, with red blood instead of ink in my veins, not an abstract mathematical problem. I've had my full share of work and unhappiness. You'll have to give me a better reason for remaining without the gate of the promised ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... excess or diminution be not glaring. If we differ in opinion about two quantities, we can have recourse to a common measure, which may decide the question with the utmost exactness; and this, I take it, is what gives mathematical knowledge a greater certainty than any other. But in things whose excess is not judged by greater or smaller, as smoothness and roughness, hardness and softness, darkness and light, the shades of colors, all these are ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... near us. I amused myself, too, by decorating the island with designs worked in sea-urchins and fancy shells of various kinds. I put AEPYORNIS ISLAND all round the place very nearly, in big letters, like what you see done with coloured stones at railway stations in the old country, and mathematical calculations and drawings of various sorts. And I used to lie watching the blessed bird stalking round and growing, growing; and think how I could make a living out of him by showing him about if I ever got taken off. After his first moult he began to get handsome, with a ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... value, but not at all less useful to me, which I found, some time after, in rummaging the chests; as, in particular, pens, ink, and paper; several parcels in the captain's, mate's, gunner's, and carpenter's keeping; three or four compasses, some mathematical instruments, dials, perspectives, charts, and books of navigation; all which I huddled together, whether I might want them or no: also I found three very good bibles, which came to me in my cargo from England, and which I had ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... added, to complete my portrait, that my uncle walked by mathematical strides of a yard and a half, and that in walking he kept his fists firmly closed, a sure sign of an irritable temperament, I think I shall have said enough to disenchant any one who should by mistake have coveted much ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... and selling: and he who has received more than he ought must make compensation to him that has suffered loss, if the loss be considerable. I add this condition, because the just price of things is not fixed with mathematical precision, but depends on a kind of estimate, so that a slight addition or subtraction would not seem to destroy the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... common-sense and a sagacious perception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed. But even these precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and the qualities needed for working rules. The change is great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminating arrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... learned to measure the mental faculties themselves, which were in no way exceptional either for depth or range. Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind was not bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or imaginative or oratorical — still less mathematical; but it worked with singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery of form. Within its ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... The mathematical intelligence and the historical intelligence (the two classes of intelligences) can never understand each other. When they succeed in doing so as to words, they differ as to the things which the words mean. At the bottom of every discussion of detail between them reappears ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... certain celebrated French woman in the last century (Mlle. de Launay), who made mathematical science her study, at last had a lover; whereupon she partially forgot her mathematics, and only remembered enough of it for practical purposes. And, in her Memoirs, she mentions the fact that her lover at length began to be less attentive to her; so much so, that she observed that whereas in walking ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage |
