"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... represented by that of the celebrated group of the Fates, among 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
... karori. Whenever a karori had collected the sum of two lakhs of dams,[5] he was required to send it to the Treasurer-General at head-quarters. It was found, however, after a time, that the arbitrary division based simply upon a mathematical theory produced {188} confusion and disturbed ancient ways, of all others most congenial to the Hindus. After a trial, then, the artificial division was abandoned in favour of the ancient system of the people, under ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions. It is not difficult in the sense in which mathematical and scientific techniques are difficult; but the fact that its modes of expression are much less precise than these, renders decidedly difficult the task of conveying it correctly to the minds ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... Judge says "In this case, the reel itself, as an article of manufacture, is conceded to be old and not the subject of a patent. The shape applied to it by the complainant is also an old, well-known mathematical figure. Now although it does not appear that any person ever before applied this particular shape to this particular article, I cannot think that the act quoted above was intended to secure to the complainant an exclusive ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... it of the utmost importance they should all be able to do so." Nothing like sails, said my friend the sailmaker; nothing like leather, says the shoemaker. I mentioned this shortly afterwards to one of my colleagues, himself an officer of unusual mathematical and scientific attainment. "No!" he exclaimed; "did he really ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... that source either dried up or became wholly inadequate to his wants; for elasticity was the felicitous peculiarity of Mr. Losely's wants. They accommodated themselves to the state of his finances with mathematical precision, always requiring exactly five times the amount of the means placed at his disposal. From a shilling to a million, multiply his wants by five times the total of his means, and you arrived at a just conclusion. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... intellectual additions made by Pythagoras to human wisdom seem to have been vast and permanent. By probable testimony, he added largely to mathematical science; and his discoveries in arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry, constitute an era in the history of the mind. His metaphysical and moral speculations are not to be separated from the additions or corruptions of his disciples. But we must at least suppose ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... important question—that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza —most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God—asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... mathematical master-spirits of the age, was bold enough once to doubt this vast power of suction on the part of the ruler of the night; and there were certain wiseacres who, as in the case of Galileo, thought it very religiously dangerous indeed, to attempt ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... red, and this exchange of luminous waves will create between the two colours a tone of reflections composed of both. These composite reflections will form a scale of tones complementary of the two principal colours. The science of optics can work out these complementary colours with mathematical exactness. If f.i. a head receives the orange rays of daylight from one side and the bluish light of an interior from the other, green reflections will necessarily appear on the nose and in the middle region ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... upon these definitions: A line is length without breadth, and A surface is length and breadth, without thickness. Mr. Smith asserts that these definitions are false, and sustains his position by numerous demonstrations in the pure Euclidean style. He declares that every mathematical line has a definite breadth, which is as measurable as its length, and that every mathematical surface has a thickness, as measurable as the contents of any solid. His demonstrations, on diagrams, seem to be eminently clear, simple, and conclusive. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... monument of another sort, and of later date,—a tribute to one of the most gallant and genial of men, in whom it was fully demonstrated that "the bravest are the tenderest." It was a pyramidal pile, about eight feet high, of carefully selected stones, laid without mortar, but with mathematical precision; and on one stone near the top was scratched a name dear to every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... credit for the manner in which he extricated the remains of the czar's army. Oyama did not feel safe in following up the pursuit. His game was that of a skillful chess player. First make sure of the result with mathematical precision, then strike. The Japanese were deaf to the demand for ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... Maker—one widely distinguished from the hypocrites and fanatics of that turbulent era, which, like our own, produced, though in a more exaggerated form, from the stimulus then abroad, the same rank and noxious weeds of hypocrisy and superstition; for man, like a mathematical problem, circumstances and conditions being the same, brings out, invariably, the same results. No form of worship, however ludicrous or revolting, but hath its advocates and supporters; and there is nothing which the proud mind and unsubdued ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... mathematical calculation, and the fame, name and gold they won was through a conscious laying hold upon the laws that bring these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... dialogue, I want to point out that I have departed somewhat from prevailing traditions by not turning my figures into catechists who make stupid questions in order to call forth witty answers. I have avoided the symmetrical and mathematical construction of the French dialogue, and have instead permitted the minds to work irregularly as they do in reality, where, during conversation, the cogs of one mind seem more or less haphazardly to engage those of another one, and where no topic is fully exhausted. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... the subject of astronomy in a succinct, popular form. No mathematical knowledge beyond the simplest outlines is assumed on the part of the reader. The great underlying facts and principles of astronomy are presented in a shape which any intelligent person can comprehend. The book may be used either for self-instruction ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... round severely). And just as mathematical calculations have irrefutably proved the existence of imponderable ether which gives rise to the phenomena of light and electricity, so the successive investigations of the ingenious Hermann, of Schmidt, and of Joseph Schmatzhofen, have confirmed beyond a doubt the existence of a substance which ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... Its spaces are divided mathematically by the rule and the square, its main lines are determined with absolute precision,—but within these limits of order the imagination works out its free results, and, because limited by mathematical laws, reaches the most perfect freedom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... academies which have sprung up in all parts of the country, have gone into the other extreme. Struck with the uselessness, to the great bulk of students, of the classical minutiae required at one of the universities, and the mathematical depth deemed indispensable at the other, they have turned education into an entirely different channel. Nothing was deemed worthy of serious attention, except what led to some practical object in life. Education was considered by their founders as merely a step to making money. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Contraction. Time aboard the great starships that lanced through the void was contracted; the nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to last only six weeks to the men on the ship, thanks to the strange mathematical effects of interstellar travel at high—but ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel frequently adopted his free contrapuntal style. Handel (and Bach, too) raised stupendous structures of ossified formulas, building architectural splendours of the materials that came to hand; but when Handel was picture-painting (as in Israel) ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... a bucolic, and not a metropolitan poet. Otherwise he would have remembered that the close of the day, or, to speak with mathematical accuracy, the hour of eight P.M., is precisely the time when the HAMLET of a well-regulated theatrical community begins to make himself vocally prominent. A few nights since, we had no less than three HAMLETS propounding at the same ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... certain success, provided there is no mistake in the work of correlating events. As Schell says: "Of all the observed identities of effect in natural phenomena only one has the complete strength of mathematical law—the general law of causation. The fact that everything that has a beginning has a cause is as old as human experience.'' The application of this proposition to our own problem shows that we are not to turn the issue in ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... "Jacob's Ladder" is a good example of the pieced quilt. 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
... and divine, was born in London and educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he afterwards became fellow, in the capacity first of mathematical lecturer, and afterwards of classical tutor. He was elected a public examiner of the university in 1804, and in the following year was one of the select preachers. As head master of Harrow (1805-1829) his all-round ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. [Greek: Hoi kyboi Dios aei eupiptousi],[108]—the dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... continually on this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all, had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before Mrs. Van Dam's august line of Dutch and English forebears, who had considerately made history and bequeathed portraits and plate. But the path of Japhet in search of a father was primrose beside the American's in ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... question would then have been as far beyond the reach of his powers, as beyond those of the most ordinary individual. The ignorance of the earth's dimensions, the manifold errors respecting the laws of motion, and the defective state of the mathematical sciences, which then prevailed, would have rendered utterly impotent the efforts of a thousand Newtons to grapple with such a problem. The time was neither ripe for the solution of that problem, nor for the appearance of a Newton. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... any shape. I made a hasty calculation that he can change his appearance in seven hundred and twenty different ways. "So many as that?" said Dawson, surprised when I told him. "I don't think that I have gone beyond sixty." I assured him that on strict mathematical principles I had arrived at the limiting number, and it gave him pleasure to feel that so many untried permutations of countenance remained to him. In actual everyday practice there are rarely ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... attempt to make an estimate of these phenomena by mathematical formulae, we would ask, What velocities must these sudden and apparently widespread outbursts represent, if they ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... what he may do next; he boils at an unknown temperature, and often explodes at a touch. He is uncertain and therefore unsafe. His best results are conjured forth, but no man has yet conjured forth a Nation—it is all slow, patient, painstaking work along mathematical lines. Washington was a mathematician and therefore not a genius. We call him a great man, but his greatness was of that sort in which we all can share; his virtues were of a kind that, in degree, we too may possess. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... is for this reason that we must undermine faith, eradicate from the minds of the Gentiles the very principle of God and soul and replace these conceptions by mathematical calculations and ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... sure, may be beyond our power; there may in some cases be no such negative proof except the exhaustion of human ingenuity in the course of time. The present theory of colour has in its favour the failure of Newton's corpuscular hypothesis and of Goethe's anti-mathematical hypothesis; but the field of conjecture remains open. On the other hand, Newton's proof that the solar system is controlled by a central force, was supported by the demonstration that a force having any other direction could not have results agreeing with Kepler's second law of the ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... that could leave the Platform with full fuel tanks should have fuel to reach the moon and land on it, and take off again and return to the Platform. The mathematical fact had a peculiar nagging flavor. When a dream is subjected to statistical analysis and the report is in its favor, a dreamer's satisfaction is always diluted by a subconscious feeling that the report is only part of the dream. Everybody worries ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... Hellenistic time, through India and Islam to the medieval Europe that inherited their learning. There are many differences, notably because of the especial development of that peculiar characteristic of the West, mathematical astronomy, conditioned by the almost accidental conflux of Babylonian arithmetical methods with those of Greek geometry. However, the lines are surprisingly similar, with the exception only of the crucial invention of the escapement, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... probable that, whatever special purpose the pyramid was intended to fulfil, a subordinate idea of the builders would have been to represent symbolically in the proportions of the building such mathematical and astronomical relations as they were acquainted with. From what we know by tradition of the men of the remote time when the pyramid was built, and what we can infer from the ideas of those who inherited, however remotely, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... of his life in academical privacy and rural retirement, without any other conversation than that of scholars, grave, studious, and abstracted as himself. He cultivated the mathematical sciences with indefatigable diligence, discovered many useful theorems, discussed with great accuracy the resistance of fluids, and, though his priority was not generally acknowledged, was the first who fully explained all the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Andrew Kelton was a mathematical scholar of high attainments. In the field of astronomy he had made important discoveries, and he carried on an extensive correspondence with observers of stellar phenomena in many far corners of the world. His name in the Madison catalogue ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... days and nights to prepare these mines. It takes careful mathematical precision to determine that they are correctly placed. It takes morale, judgment, courage, and intelligence—this fighting from house to house. And yet the French are called a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... other people to ask. Private Secretaryships to Ministers, or societies, or great Clubs, are not invariably given to the first applicant who comes along, even if he appeals to testimonials in the Junior Mathematical Class from Professor MCGLASHAN of St. Mungo's. But SAUNDERS was not daunted. He would write to one notable, informing him that his grandmother had been at a parish school with the notable's great uncle—on which ground of acquaintanceship he would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... book had a powerful influence upon his life. It gave him an idea, through the application of measurement to the earth's surface, of that order and beauty of those mathematical principles after which the Creator built the universe. It opened his eyes to the vast modification of the landscape, and the earth itself, by man's work upon its crust. It gave him the engineer's eye. Henceforth he became interested in the capacity of every portion of the country, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... believed, as has been said, in natural laws, implanted in every breast, finding their expression in every conscience; and many of them entertained a crude notion that such laws could easily be applied to the enormously complicated facts of actual life. Assuming such laws to exist, as absolute as mathematical axioms and far easier of application, all variation was error, all anomaly absurd, all claims of a privileged class ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... increased number of spheres was evolved, the total number required by Aristotle reaching fifty-five. It may be regarded as counting in Aristotle's favour that he did consider the earth to be a sphere and not a flat disc, but he seems to have thought that the mathematical spheres of Eudoxus had a real solid existence, and that not only meteors, shooting stars and aurora, but also comets and the milky way belong to the atmosphere. His really great service to science in collating and criticising ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... he went to a forester for instruction, but did not remain long. Meantime he had gained some mathematical knowledge, and devoted himself to surveying. By this and similar work he earned a living, until, at the end of seven years, he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main to learn the rudiments of building. There Fate brought him into ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... plates of the Smiths, matted with black, and deeply framed, occupied the place of honour over the mantel. On the marble-topped table in the exact centre of the room was a basket of wax flowers and fruit, covered by a bell-shaped glass shade. Miss Hitty's album and her Bible were placed near it with mathematical precision. On the opposite wall was a hair wreath, made from the shorn locks of departed Smiths by Miss Hitty's mother. The proud possessor felt a covert reproach in the fact that she herself was unable to ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... more pillow-cases than we were entitled to. All unwittingly, in my eagerness to placate Sister, I had published the mild chicanery in which she had indulged on behalf of her ward. The sergeant, growing grey in the solution of these abstruse mathematical and psychological mysteries, had suspected this Sister all along. He enlightened me. She had recently been transferred from another ward—and in her going had (against the rules) wafted with her a small selection of that ward's property.... And ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... the formulae, equations, and symbols. He recalls vividly his admiration of the author's ingenious method of deriving equations. Every succeeding theorem, formula, or equation was another puzzle in a subject which seemed to be composed of a series of difficult, unrelated, and unapplied mathematical proofs. The course ended, the mass of data was soon obliterated from the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... interior of a stable. Overhead are piles of hay; along the walls are wheels, tubes, shafts, a long copper chimney, a huge boiler. To the left of the spectator the Madonna is sculptured on a pillar. To the right is a table strewn with paper and mathematical instruments. Above the table hangs on the wall a blackboard covered with figures; by the side of the table is a shelf on which are onions, a water crock and a loaf. To the right of the spectator is a wide door, and to the left, a door ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Hall went very aggressively into the parlour and looked very hard at his wife's furniture, just to show that the stranger wasn't master there, and scrutinised closely and a little contemptuously a sheet of mathematical computations the stranger had left. When retiring for the night he instructed Mrs. Hall to look very closely at the stranger's luggage ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... horses. Three undergraduates got out of the coach. I asked them why they had so many horses, and they said, "Because of the luggage." I then said, "The luggage is much more than the undergraduates. Can you tell me how to express this in mathematical symbols? This is the way: if x is the weight of an undergraduate, then x x.n represents the weight of an undergraduate and his luggage together." I noticed that this sally was received ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Helen assumed the mathematical centre of the squab, and began to arrange her skirts in cascading folds; she had posed her parasol in a corner of it, as though the squab had been a railway carriage, which, indeed, it ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... published his first almanac, under the title, "Merlinus Angelicus Junior, the English Merlin Revived, or a Mathematical Prediction of the English Commonwealth." This publication was issued annually for nearly forty years, and found a ready sale, being shrewdly adapted to the popular taste. Lilly was said to have acquired considerable influence over the credulous monarch, Charles I, who was wont to consult him regarding ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... work, and the result will be, that for the first time, our philosophy of the aetherial medium will agree with our experience; and, as the natural result, several outstanding problems will be explained on a physical basis, which at the present time cannot be satisfactorily explained except from the mathematical standpoint. ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... still persists in raising its grisly head—namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation of whole virgin continents, has for generations given the apparent lie to Malthus' mathematical statement of the Law of Population, nevertheless the essential significance of his doctrine remains and cannot be challenged. Population does press against subsistence. And no matter how rapidly subsistence increases, population is certain ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... months, the ship being chased away by two French South-Sea ships; but the Cinque-ports returned and took them off, at which time he was left. He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock and some powder and bullets, some tobacco, a knife, a kettle, a bible, with some other books, and his mathematical instruments. He diverted himself and provided for his sustenance as well as he could; but had much ado to bear up against melancholy for the first eight months, and was sore distressed at being left ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... producing the most delicate changes of light and shade, and contours of the most subtle grace. Many of them correspond to conic sections, but it seems probable that the outlines were drawn by hand, and not obtained by any mechanical or mathematical method. ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... to speak more properly, to the views of superstition" (p. 219). But the light from Arabia was struggling to penetrate Christendom. Gerbert, a native of France, travelled into Spain, and studied in the Arabian schools of Cordova and Seville, under Arabian doctors; he developed mathematical ability, and returned into Christendom with some amount of learning: raised to the papal throne, under the name of Sylvester II., he tried to restore the study of science and philosophy, and found that his geometrical figures "were regarded by the monks ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... an acuter phase in a fortnight or so, when Nicholas began to resume his mathematical studies. There lies just opposite the O'Beirnes' front door a low turf bank, gently sloping, and mostly clothed with short, fine grass, but liable to be cut into brown squares, if sods are wanted for roofing a shed, or for spreading a green layer of scraws under new thatch. ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... was fixed on animals, plants, and the starry firmament. With regard to medicine, he used to say that it was not clear and defined in practice. He wanted to measure the scope of a disease, and to supply the remedies by mathematical rule. He saw, too, that medical men were less valued for their real worth than for their tact in winning confidence through the credulity of the public. This was particularly exemplified in a gold-field, where the greatest impostors obtained credit for a time. His thoughts and conversation ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... mathematical process, he finally succeeded in making computations from the percentages of the various compounds reported in the soil separates and from the percentages of these different separates contained in the soils themselves and from the known weights of normal ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... they discussed it afterwards, ages of purely utilitarian civilisation had brought all conditions of Martian life up—or down—to the same level. There was no apparent difference between the males and females in stature; their faces were all the same, with features of mathematical regularity, pale skin, bloodless cheeks, and an expression, if such it could be called, utterly devoid ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... with various individual, outstanding characters. He never asserted himself. He seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides, he was very good-looking, of medium ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... bared to the elbow and white with flour, the spouse of mine host realized the scriptural injunction: "She looketh well to the ways of her household." Deftly she spread the dough in the baking pan; smoothly leveled it with her palm; with nice mathematical precision distributed bits of apple on top in parallel rows; lightly sprinkled it with sugar, and, lo and behold, was fashioned an honest, wholesome, Dutch apple cake, ready ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... wealth to the "owning" nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time. It requires an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies, whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the same time. It is so much easier to ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... first person said and proved that the number of births or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this or that mode of government is determined by certain geographical and economic conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil produce migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had been built were ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... said Herbert, button-holing his own waistcoat; 'but he's spoilt by two bad traits. In the first place, he's so dreadfully conscious of the fact that he has risen from a lower position; and then, again, he's so engrossingly and pervadingly mathematical. X square seems to have seized upon him bodily, and to have wormed its fatal ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... by a million radiating paths. It was not that she left Maurice behind her, for all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with the circumference. He saw himself diminished to a mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. For Frida he had ceased to have any objective existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what the Colonel would have called an abstraction. There was nothing for him to do but to accept the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... original portion of the Tables of the Law (broken on a familiar occasion by the prophet), Hannibal's cigarette case, a landing net (at one time in the possession of Alcibiades), a piece of chalk used by Archimedes in his mathematical demonstrations, the bronze shoe of Empedocles, the arrow on which Abaris flew, and the walking-stick, a considerable piece of timber, which Dr. Johnson lost in Mull, may all be reposing in some private collection. Collectors do get very ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... soil of these plains was here and there marked by very regular pentagonal, hexagonal, and heptagonal cracks, and, as these cracks retain the moisture of occasional rains better than the intervening space, they were fringed with young grass, which showed these mathematical figures very distinctly. We passed a great number of dry swamps or swampy water-holes; sometimes however containing a little water. They were surrounded by the Mangrove myrtle (Stravadium), which was mentioned as growing at the lower Lynd. The bottom of the dry swamps was covered with a ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... seized him that this dull misery of hunger and dirt had settled upon him perpetually—there was no use in combating it; and, with an animal-like stoicism, he followed the other away from the road, out of the hollow, to where row upon row of young ornamental trees reached in mathematical perspective to broad sheds, glittering expanses of glass, a huddle of toolhouses, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... why,' Blenkiron repeated. '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 ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... theoretical physics and chemistry are now in a position to afford to this unifying conception of nature an exact, to a certain extent, indeed, a mathematical confirmation. In establishing the law of the "conservation of energy," Robert Mayer and Helmholtz showed that the energy of the universe is a constant unchangeable magnitude; if any energy whatever seems to vanish or to come ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... commencement of the voyage to quitting the north coast of Terra Australis in March 1803; and a book containing all the bearings and angles which entered into the construction of the charts. The time keeper, with the mathematical and nautical instruments belonging to the Navy Board were also sent; and in fine, either the original or a copy of every thing in my possession which related either to the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... even to rashness; but cross-grained and incorrigibly obstinate: his genius was fertile in mathematical experiments, and he possessed some knowledge of chemistry: he was polite even to excess, unseasonably; but haughty, and even brutal, when he ought to have been gentle and courteous: he was tall, and his manners were ungracious: he had a dry hard-favoured visage, and a stern ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... whom I talked, who had lived in and about the canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here, the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and deepening could not have been apprehended by ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... the side of Kant and his philosophy, to all who are acquainted with the disagreeable controversies of late years among French geometricians of the first rank, and sometimes among British ones, on the question of mathematical evidence. Legendre and Professor Leslie took part in one such a dispute; and the temper in which it was managed was worthy of admiration, as contrasted with the angry controversies of elder days, if, indeed, it did not err in an opposite spirit, by too elaborate and ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... endow my robot with intelligence. I add a mechanical memory by means of the old Cushman delayed valve; I add a mathematical sense with any of the calculating machines; I give it a voice and a vocabulary with the magnetic-impulse wire phonograph. Now the point I make is this: Granted an intelligent machine, does it not follow that every other machine ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... outcome of an opinion. Whenever the opinion returns, the different thoughts with which it would be accompanied would so color it as to change it, and the standard with it. It is obvious, therefore, that a standard must be the result of definite mathematical and other measured proof, and not of an opinion, and that the standard must be in such physical shape that the subject-matter will always be clearly defined, otherwise the ultimate losses resulting from dependent sequences of ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... and upon the very points of their feet. Then they wheeled about and began to circle in the opposite direction. Twice they repeated this motion, their snarls growing louder. But still they did not come together, and the distance of five feet between them was maintained with an almost mathematical precision. It was magnificent, but it was not war. Then the setter, pausing in his walk, turned his head slowly from his enemy. The collie sniffed the air and pretended an interest in an old shoe lying in the gutter. Gradually and ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the light thrown on the nature of the human brain by the evolution of the mathematical process. Crown 8vo., ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel
... the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical mortification, for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. It was really very interesting—the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn, and she was proud ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... Chanute was with us, a good deal of time was spent in discussion of the mathematical calculations upon which we had based our machine. He informed us that, in designing machinery, about 20 per cent. was usually allowed for the loss in the transmission of power. As we had allowed only 5 per cent., a figure we had arrived at by some crude measurements of the friction ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... the eighteenth century had implicit faith in the powers of human reason to reach the truth. With its logical-mathematical method it endeavored to illuminate every nook and corner of knowledge, to remove all obscurity, mystery, bigotry, and superstition, to find a reason for everything under the sun. Nature, religion, the State, law, morality, language, and art were brought under the searchlight of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... often obliged to see on business. The giant was alone and was seated behind a broad polished table, occupied in writing. Orsino was struck by the extremely orderly arrangement of everything he saw. Papers were tied together in bundles of exactly like shape, which lay in two lines of mathematical precision. The big inkstand was just in the middle of the rows and a paper-cutter, a pen-rack and an erasing knife lay side by side in front of it. The walls were lined with low book-cases of a heavy and severe type, ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... objects. But emotions are essentially capable of objectification, as well as impressions of sense; and one may well believe that a primitive and inexperienced consciousness would rather people the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions than with projections of those luminous and mathematical concepts which as yet it could ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... his proposition to the town, he was disturbed in his calculations by the abstraction from his little army of two thousand English troops ordered by the States-General to march to the defence of Ostend. The most mathematical but most obedient of princes, annoyed but not disconcerted, sent off the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dreariest region some beauty at some time of day or at some season may be discovered. We shall, in short, be taught to cultivate the sense for Natural Beauty, and how to put in fitting words a description of the beauty we see. Our geography textbooks, besides all the mathematical, physical, political, and commercial geography they contain, will tell us something of the Natural Beauty of the countries they set themselves to describe. And geographers when they set themselves ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... his own description of the late affair-of-honourable assassination, was highly edifying to the philosophic mind. The pleasing and amiable tones in which he stated how irretrievably he was ruined, the dulcet sweetness of the farewell to his heart's adored, the mathematical exactitude of his position while embracing her, the cool deliberation which marked his exit—offered a picture of calm stoicism just on the point of tumbling over the precipice of destruction not to be equalled—not, at least, since those halcyon dramatic days when Osbaldiston leased Covent Garden, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... they who know not the force of Mathematical demonstrations, and are not accustomed to distinguish true reasons from probable ones, may not venture to deny this without examining it, I shall advertise them, that this motion which I have now discovered, as necessarily follows from the onely disposition of the organs (which may ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... The mathematical education which he had received under Count Platen now proved very serviceable. He passed the examination with great distinction, and in the course of it, to the surprise of the examiners, showed that he could repeat Euclid verbatim,—not by the exercise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... state of affairs, reached by respectably villainous fathers the world over, when the son demonstrates the mathematical law of progression by becoming a villain without regard for the respectabilities. Mr. Farley saw the growing outlaw in his son, was not a little disturbed thereby, and was beginning to crouch ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... never assume to reduce her to the logical rules which govern the mathematical mind, but are always prepared for the little eccentricities which render her at once so charming and uncertain. The Frenchwoman perhaps carries this uncertainty to a higher state of perfection than her sex of any ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... seven millions of them are subjects of insurance by fetich.[18] They are guaranteed against fire, thieves, lightning, plague and pestilence. It is because of money paid to the priests that the wooden policies are duly nailed on the walls, and not on account of the wise application of mathematical, financial or medical science. Examine also the paper packages carefully tied and affixed above the transom, decipher the writing in ink or the brand left by the hot iron on the little slabs of pine-wood—there may be one or a score of them—and what will ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... simultaneously in the mind, for the mind cannot rest on Duality, but is forced by a law of its nature to rest only on the joint emanation of the Two. Thus the first natural resting point is the Trinity. The next is the Hebdomad or Septenary, according to the mathematical formula 2^{n}-1, the sum of n things taken 1, 2, 3 ... n, at a time. The Trinity being manifested, n here 3; and 2^{3}-1 ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... told her mother it was very different going to a town from what it would be if she were a missionary going to the wilds. It was an important school she was to teach, where her Latin and German and mathematical achievements had won her the place above several other applicants, and where her well-known tact was expected to work wonders. But what were Latin and German and mathematics now? Could they show her how to climb a water-tank? Would tact avail with a ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... of the last fifteen years and a few of the mathematical deductions from them. We are not yet in a position to say positively that the atoms are composed of electrons, but it is clear that the experts are properly modest in claiming only that this is highly probable. The atom seems to be a little universe in ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... examination-papers for Abbott to struggle with; but, like bees who spend the pleasantest weather in hardest work, he was laying up mathematical sweetness and psychological succulence against the day when he might become a professor at Yale ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... it is quite certain that my conscious intelligence could make neither head nor tail of it. I did not so much as know what it meant or whether the exponent 3. 4. 5 called for a multiplication, a division or some other mathematical operation which I did not even try to imagine; and, rack MY memory as I may, I cannot remember any moment in my life when I knew more about it than I do now. We should therefore have to admit that MY subliminal self is a born mathematician, quick, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... practice of Induced Autosuggestion, we use in the world of mind an instrument fashioned for use in the world of matter. It is as if we tried to solve a mathematical problem by mauling the ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... massive head very slowly. "It was not very interesting," he said. "And I do not have a mathematical mind." ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... separateness of being. He looks only for fixed and inert human quantities, with which he may juggle at will. He did not possess insight; and the analytic quality of which he was so proud was merely a sort of mathematical ingenuity of calculation, in which, however, he was extraordinarily keen. As a mere potency, dissociated from qualities, Poe must be rated almost highest among American poets, and high among prosaists; no one else offers so much pungency, such impetuous ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... honorary monument to his memory in the cloisters of their college. We have dwelt thus long on Lydiat's name, because, when this poem was published, it was a subject of inquiry, who Lydiat was, though some of his contemporaries, both in England and on the continent, ranked him with lord Bacon, in mathematical and physical knowledge. For a more detailed account, see Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary, vol. xxi. whence the above facts have been extracted, and Gentleman's Magazine, vol. lxviii. GALILEO, and his history, are too well known ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Prince, whose mathematical ability is quite exceptional, "two twenty-five-cent pieces are equal to one fifty-cent piece. I must try to remember that. Meantime," he added, with a gesture of royal condescension, putting the money in his pocket, "I will keep your coins as instructors"—we murmured our thanks—"and now explain ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the conviction, 'A tie has begun to ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... until lately, by all the regular life insurance companies. Properly carried out, the one is as sound in theory and as safe in practice as the other. In fact, the artificial premiums are the exact mathematical or commuted ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... in performance which only later become overt in speed and accuracy are being attained during these seemingly profitless and discouraging intervals. Not infrequently in the acquisition of skill in the playing of tennis or the piano, or in the solution of mathematical problems, a decided gain in skill and speed comes after what seems to be not only lack of progress but decided backsliding.[1] It is this which led William James to quote with approval the aphorism that one learns to skate in summer and swim ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... 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 to all the attempts of mere ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... get at the city methods he would have covered almost the entire ground of the field-work of the Decennial Census, and while he was sorry to leave his Porto Rican friend, still the novelty appealed to him greatly, and in spite of his former chief's mathematical conversation, Hamilton was genuinely ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... theoretical physicist. A really original-type thinker. You come up with a mathematical system that explains all known phenomena at that time, and predicts others that are, as yet, unknown. You check your math over and over again; there's no error in your logic, since it ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work: ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... increase only in arithmetical ratio; and that this means that constant discrepancies between population and food supply would appear, with the result that population would have to be cut down to food supply. Later Malthus saw how crude this statement of his theory was and abandoned any attempt at mathematical statement, presenting substantially the following theory: (1) Population is necessarily limited by food; (2) Population always increases where food increases and tends to increase faster than food; ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... H.—Your answer to No. 4 of the mathematical puzzles is right. If you look carefully you will discover why the ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... (Herrada) also went with Legazpi to the Philippines, from Mexico. He was born at Pamplona, July 20, 1533, and at the age of twenty became an Augustinian friar; he was noted for his mathematical and linguistic ability. In 1572, he was provincial of his order in the Philippines, and was sent as ambassador twice to China and once to Borneo. On his return voyage from this latter mission, he died at sea, in the month ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... be able to count rapidly and correctly, to add, subtract or multiply, and he understands the relation of numbers to each other, their properties, and because of his superior sense in this direction he becomes a "lightning calculator" and is regarded as a mathematical prodigy. There are others who have this sense deficient, but they may be superior in development to the mathematical prodigy in a dozen ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... 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 ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... exceeded my expectations. About three-fourths of the number taught can draw most of the simple mathematical lines and figures, given as copies on the slates used, with tolerable accuracy, and write all the letters of the alphabet in a fair script hand. This experiment satisfies me that, with the proper ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... years been examining undergraduates for little goes and great goes, and had passed his life in putting posing questions, in detecting ignorance by viva voce scrutiny, and eliciting learning by printed papers. He, by a stupendous effort of his mathematical mind, had divided the adult British male world into classes and sub-classes, and could tell at a moment's notice how long it would take him to examine them all. His soul panted for the work. Every man should, he thought, be made to pass through some 'go.' The greengrocer's boy should not carry ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through the intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his father. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... conversation to his father when the scientist came in from late work in the laboratory. Hartson Brant nodded wearily. "Good. If Marks is on the way, that means he has answers we need badly to some of our mathematical problems." ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... of $10,000 a year or more from various kinds of nuts, and we know there are many such orchards. It is the failures upon which we should concentrate our attentions right now, and the reason for failure is not that nut growing is not going to make progress but that we cannot count on our nuts from a mathematical basis. One of my friends, an old Frenchman, became very enthusiastic about raising poultry. He sent out requests for circulars to every poultry fancier who published circulars, and I will wager that he ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible, an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the face of it, no evidence of its credibility ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... collected from all the States, instead of being confined to those that are loyal. The rebel confederate debt, never having had any existence in law or justice, but having been created only to support a wicked rebellion, will of course be expunged by the reestablishment of the Union. Indeed, by a new mathematical and philosophical principle, far transcending the most sublime discoveries of Newton, Leibnitz, or La Place, the rebel debt is redeemable six months after the end of eternity, namely, six months after it is an independent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the distinction of holding a law desk in the General Land Office, having been transferred to it from the Census Office, where she had been dealing with mathematical problems. It was found that a $1,600 clerk was back in his work with 300 cases which it was necessary to have adjudicated. The bringing this work up to date was assigned to her. Prior to this she had written ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... granted 1546—a hand proper, vested argent, issuing out of clouds, and feeling a pulse; in base, a pomegranate between five demi fleurs-de-lis bordering the edge of the escutcheon. In front of the building was a library, and there were early donations of books, globes, mathematical instruments, minerals, &c. Dissections were first permitted by Queen Elizabeth, in 1564. As soon as the first lectures were founded, in 1583, a spacious anatomical theatre was built adjoining Linacre's house, and here the great Dr. Harvey gave his first course of lectures; but about ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... carriage to grow more and more uncomfortable, and myself to feel more and more cramped. Consequently, I relapsed into devoting my whole faculties to the distance-posts and their numerals, and to solving difficult mathematical problems for reckoning the time when we should ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... This information is presented in Appendix E: Weights and Measures and includes mathematical notations (mathematical powers and names), metric interrelationships (prefix; symbol; length, weight, or capacity; area; volume), and standard ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Haughtiness, that when his other more momentous Avocations of Pedantry and Pedagogism will give him an Interval from Wrath and Contention, he will set apart a Moment to consider human Nature Deviliz'd, and give us a Mathematical Anatomical Description of it; with a Map of Satan's Kingdom in the Microcosm of Mankind, and such other Illuminations as to him and his Contemporaries —— and, —— &c. in their great ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study merely ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... "Baptism"—Uccello seems to have been possessed with nothing but the scientific intention to find out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended in space. A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has no psychological significance. Uccello, it is true, has studied every detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... one hand and the sugar left in each cell on the other hand, after the battery is fully in operation, are not so readily deduced. The theory is easily understood, however, although the computation is somewhat intricate. Those who desire to follow the process by mathematical formula are referred to pages 9 and 10, Bulletin No. 2, Chemical Division U.S. Department of Agriculture, where will be found the formula furnished by Professor Harkness, of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... in this direction the reader may consult a paper by L. J. Rogers in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... accident as the upward movement of the saturated air, expanded by its own agency to so great an extent, so sudden and discontinuous in its action, so obscure in its origin, and so distinct in its effects,—such a phenomenon defies the powers of mathematical prediction, and rouses all the winds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... soprano gave close particulars of their return along this self-same path. All the evidence went to show that a suspension of natural laws had taken place, the simultaneous presence of all four at that stile seeming a mathematical certainty from which escape ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... an 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 was what he was because forces beyond his control ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the cleanest, neatest-looking red brick house in all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds, almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... the picture. Had Mrs. Bagley been alone, she and Tim could go off and marry and then settle down in Timbuctoo if they wanted to. But not with Martha. She was in the same intellectual kettle of sardines as James. Her taste in education was by no means the same. She took to the mathematical subjects indifferently, absorbing them well enough—once she could be talked into spending the couple of hours that each day demanded—but without interest. Martha could rattle off quotations from literary masters, she could follow the score of most operas (her voice was a bit off-key but ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... a rich Turkey carpet, the spoils of the tent of a Pacha, after the great battle of Jaiza, where the Astrologer had fought abreast with the valiant champion of Christendom, Matthias Corvinus. On the table lay a variety of mathematical and astrological instruments, all of the most rich materials and curious workmanship. His astrolabe of silver was the gift of the Emperor of Germany, and his Jacob's staff of ebony [a divining rod made of a hazel fork], jointed ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... women, who never braided their hair or put on gorgeous apparel. See you that bust? It represents Diana of the Ephesians, the very Diana who endangered Paul's life; and did I not rightly call this malignant priest Alexander the copper-smith? And here are necromancing figures," (taking up the Doctor's mathematical exercises,) "squares and triangles, and the sun, moon and stars, which Job said he never worshipped.—And here is that unrighteous Babylonish instrument, an organ, which proves he is either a Jew or a Papist, as none but the favourers of abominable ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... be compelled to use various phases of his chemical, arithmetical, writing, and bookkeeping knowledge, and that perhaps in the midst of a mass of other accidental impressions. In like manner, the girl in her home cooking might meet in a single experience a situation requiring mathematical, chemical, and physical knowledge for its successful adjustment, as in the substitution of soda and cream of tartar for baking-powder. This complex character of the problems of actual life may prove so bewildering ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the majority were content to set an example of self-sacrifice and sterling patriotism, and the regiments were thus still leavened with a large admixture of educated and intelligent men. It is a significant fact that during those months of 1863 which were spent in winter quarters Latin, Greek, mathematical, and even Hebrew classes were instituted by the soldiers. But all trace of social distinction had long since vanished. Between the rich planter and the small farmer or mechanic there was no difference either in aspect or habiliments. Tanned by the hot Virginia sun, thin-visaged and bright-eyed, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... conformity with the scientific method we take into consideration merely such interactions as the facts of common knowledge and actual experience offer us. Thus will we be able, happily, to formulate a principle of the reciprocal interaction of heterogeneous ethnic, or, if you will, social elements, the mathematical certainty and universality of which cannot be denied irrefutably, since it manifests itself ever and everywhere in the field of history ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a feeling of weakness and dependence, and at the same time in his rational nature a feeling of freedom and superiority. He objects, however, to the Kantian nomenclature. For the two kinds of sublime which Kant called the mathematical and the dynamic, he proposes the names of the theoretical and the practical; meaning by the former that which tends to overawe the mind, by the latter that which tends to overawe the feeling. Then follows a long and juiceless Begriffszergliederung, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... less disqualified for important work. It is said that a distinguished engineer was always afraid to cross his own bridges, although built in the most thorough and approved manner. He was deficient in confidence. Another engineer distinguished for his mathematical attainments built a bridge which promptly collapsed at the first opportunity. On overhauling his computations he ejaculated somewhat forcibly, "That confounded minus sign! It should have been plus." He was deficient in sound judgment, or what is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... afterwards dined by invitation with the university of Cambridge, where she conferred the honour of knighthood upon Dr. Ellis the vice-chancellor, upon James Montague, counsel for the University, and upon the celebrated Isaac Newton, mathematical professor. The two houses of convocation still continued at variance. The lower house penned petulant representations, and the archbishop answered them by verbal reprehension and admonition. The tory interest was now in the wane. The duke of Buckinghamshire was deprived of the privy-seal, and that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the older students for his extraordinary quickness in solving the problems of his father's class. It was quite plain that his genius lay in the direction of mathematics; and on finishing at Glasgow he was sent to the higher mathematical school of St. Peter's College, Cambridge. In 1845 he graduated as second wrangler, but won the Smith prize. This 'consolation stakes' is regarded as a better test of originality than the tripos. The first, or senior, wrangler ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... linguistic training of the citizen, in the use of his own and any other necessary language, should not be done for good and all by fourteen, why he should not have a fairly complete mastery of form and quantity through mathematical training and drawing, and why the way should not be clear and immediate for the development of that adult mental edifice of which this is ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... was perfect, seeming to form a regular chain, reaching from his earliest childhood up to the time I knew him, without a link wanting. His power of calculation, too, was extraordinary. I called myself pretty quick at figures, and had been through a course of mathematical studies; but, working by my head, I was unable to keep within sight of this man, who had never been beyond his arithmetic. He carried in his head, not only a log-book of the voyage, which was complete and accurate, and from which no ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the officers had waited for Trooper Weldon to bring his bolting steed back into some semblance of alignment. The pause always ended with Weldon upright in his saddle, his face beaming with jovial smiles and his horse ranged up with mathematical precision. The delays were by no means helpful to discipline. Nevertheless, the officers yielded to the inevitable with the better grace, inasmuch as no one else would voluntarily trust life and limb to the vicious beasts ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... 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 and incisive, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... may I point out on behalf of our four-footed friends what admirable service they render the community by the destruction of flies? My Irish terrier, Patsy, spends half his time catching blue-bottles—indeed, my husband, who is of a mathematical turn, estimates that he accounts for several hundreds every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... binder's. When they come home I shall have two—the "Camp" and "Patrick's Day"—to read for the first time. I may say three, for I never read the "School for Scandal." "Seen it I have, and in its happier days." With the books Harwood left a truncheon or mathematical instrument, of which we have not yet ascertained the use. It is like a telescope, but unglazed. Or a ruler, but not smooth enough. It opens like a fan, and discovers a frame such as they weave lace upon at Lyons and Chambery. Possibly it is from those parts. I do not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a divine simplicity in the English mind that one may lay one's plans with mathematical precision, and rely upon the Nayland Smiths and Dr. Petries to play their allotted parts. Excepting two faithful followers, my friends are long since departed. But here, in these vaults which time has overlooked and which are as secret and as serviceable to-day as they were two hundred years ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... mechanical ability of any American farmer or farm boy; and to show that electricity itself is far from being the dangerous death-dealing "fluid" of popular imagination. Electricity must be studied; and then it becomes an obedient, tireless servant. During the past decade or two, mathematical wizards have studied electricity, explored its atoms, reduced it to simple arithmetic—and although they cannot yet tell us why it is generated, they tell us how. It is with this simple arithmetic, and the necessary manual operations that ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... that what we long ago spun has vanished, broken by the winds of time into nothingness. It is not so. For the eternal substance there is no before and after; all truth is truth. 'Far and forgot to me is near,' it says. In the unvarying precision of its mathematical ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... directly downwards into the bowels of the earth, and in a few hours will take us to the old granitic formation. In this we shall undoubtedly find innumerable springs. The nature of the rock makes this a mathematical certainty, and instinct agrees with logic to say that it is so. Now, this is the serious proposition which I have to make to you. When Christopher Columbus asked of his men three days to discover the land of promise, his men ill, terrified, and hopeless, yet gave ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Table.—The "best cloth" and napkins are brought out for the dinner party. The cloth must be laid with mathematical exactness, its center exactly on the center of the table. The centerpiece, almost invariably of flowers, only occasionally of fruit, is also exactly placed. This should be low; it is awkward not to be able to see one's vis-a-vis, and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter |
