"Theorem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Jimsy's own version of it. She always kept his letter for the last, childishly, on the nursery theorem of "First the worst, second the same, last the ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—elementary mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of Triangles—unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy—than for him to be an expert in Choctaw, the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the Sacred Books of the East, the records of the Past, and particularly the psychic phenomena of different ages, finding at last the Constructive Theorem clearer than anywhere else in the "School of Natural Science," from the fact that it is demonstrably cognizant of all preceding work, and definitely conforms to the strict demands of Science—Physical, Mental, Ethical, Psychical and Spiritual, and proves to be the very thing for which ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... intellect. When he looked one in the face with intention, and suddenly allowed one to realise, as it were, all the dominating power of his brain, one shrank into insignificance, one felt as an ignorant, intelligent man may feel when confronted with some elaborate theorem of the higher mathematics. "Is it possible that any one can really understand these things?" such a man might think with awe, and in the same way one apprehended some vast, inconceivable possibilities of mind-function ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene? Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... derives its obligation from some general principle round which custom has not thrown the same halo, the assertion is to him a paradox; the supposed corollaries seem to have a more binding force than the original theorem; the superstructure seems to stand better without, than with, what is represented as its foundation. He says to himself, I feel that I am bound not to rob or murder, betray or deceive; but why am I bound to promote the general happiness? If my own happiness lies in something else, ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... or man rises to find his own; until the great impetus in our national life is toward the end of developing the intrinsic values of each child, and fitting the task to it; so long as trade masters the many, and the minds of the majority are attracted toward the simple theorem of making cheap and forcing sales, or buying cheap and selling dear; so long as the child is competitively educated in great classes, and the pride of life is in possession of material things, instead of the eternal things—just so long will we have war and governmental ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Dawn? How if it never break? How if this West by other Wests is pierced. And these by vacant Wests and Wests increased— One pain of space, with hollow ache on ache, Throbbing and ceasing not for Christ's own sake? Big, perilous theorem, hard for king and priest; 'Pursue the West but long enough, 'tis East!' Oh, if this watery world no turning take; Oh, if for all my logic, all my dreams, Provings of that which is by that which seems, Fears, hopes, chills, heats, hastes, patiences, droughts, tears, Wife-grievings, slights ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... teaching it, he cannot change the words in it, or the inflections of the declensions and conjugations. And the same restriction is laid upon our inclinations in the different divisions of Natural History, in the theorems of Arithmetic, Geometry, &c. The theorem of Pascal remains still the theorem of Pascal, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Barnes's shop nor to the Marshalls for nearly a month. One Sunday morning he was poring over the Moreh Nevochim, for it had proved too powerful a temptation for him, and he fell upon the theorem that without God the Universe could not continue to exist, for God is its Form. It was one of those sayings which may be nothing or much to the reader. Whether it be nothing or much depends upon ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... And the fact that they have interested and given pleasure to man for untold ages is no doubt due in some measure to the appeal they make to the eye as well as to the brain. Sometimes an algebraical formula or theorem seems to give pleasure to the mathematician's eye, but it is probably only an intellectual pleasure. But there can be no doubt that in the case of certain geometrical problems, notably dissection or superposition ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... clearly impossible. The conclusion of a geometrical theorem is a truth for all time. There is no difference here between a complicated theorem, having many conditions, and a simpler theorem with fewer. It is indeed easier for a few than for many conditions to be all present together: but the enunciation of the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the expansive force of steam many centuries ago. The ancient Hindus were the first to determine the velocity of light and the laws of its reflection; and the table of Pythagoras and his celebrated theorem of the square of hypotenuse are to be found in the ancient books of Jyotisha. All this leads us to suppose that ancient Aryans, when instituting the strange custom of wearing silk during meals, had something serious in view, more serious, at ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair, enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... one can easily imagine that once the idea of Number became associated with that of the knowable in things, a wide field of detailed development and experiment, so to speak, in the arcana of nature, seemed to be opened. Every arithmetical or geometrical theorem became in this view another window giving light into the secret heart of things. Number became a kind of god, a revealer; and the philosophy of number a kind of religion or mystery. And this is why the {26} second grade of disciples were called Mathematicians; mathematics was the essential ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... reduced by the French mathematical school to a question of probability. "The probability of a continuous variable is obtained by considering elementary independent domains of equal probability.... In the classic dynamics we use, to find these elementary domains, the theorem that two physical states of which one is the necessary effect of the other are equally probable. In a physical system if we represent by q one of the generalized coordinates and by p the corresponding momentum, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... doubt. He was not too sure, but that this frank, clear, virtuous girl could read him through. Sometimes he felt uncomfortable. Just now, he felt as dogged as any ambitious school-boy ever did over an obstinate theorem in Euclid—here was a problem—there were all the rules for its clear solution, yet the answer never would come right. Perhaps he was preparing for another attempt, as he drew his chair closer to her and looked into her face, while they sat in the spot of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... it's time for me to learn my lessons. See here! what I've got to do," said Tom, drawing Maggie toward him and showing her his theorem, while she pushed her hair behind her ears, and prepared herself to prove her capability of helping him in Euclid. She began to read with full confidence in her own powers, but presently, becoming quite bewildered, her face ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... would be more finished still. Not one of Petrarch's sonnets is a really finished production; no, nor any other man's sonnets. Nothing that the mind of man can conceive is perfect, save it be a mathematical theorem." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... affording such ample proof of the beauty and order of the universe; to whose very laws Kepler, the friend and contemporary of the philosopher, was even then, though unconsciously, bearing evidence, by his wonderful theorem of velocities and distances, a problem which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world except ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... over the problem of finding two squares whose sum is a square, I chanced on a theorem (which seems true, though I cannot prove it), that if x squared y squared be even, its half is the sum of two squares. A kindred theorem, that 2(x squared y squared) is always the sum of two squares, also ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical; About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, With interesting facts about the square of the hypotenuse, I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous. In short, in matters vegetable, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... will take the verses for nonsense. Reflection, however, has convinced me that yoga is not nonsense. One who has not studied the elements of Geometry or Algebra, cannot, however intelligent, hope to understand at once a Proposition of the Principia or the theorem of De Moivre. Failing to give the actual sense, I have contented myself ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs; and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that the locusts ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he exclaimed at length; "the corollary is worse than the theorem, and things are becoming so decidedly mixed that we must begin to go slow. I for one propose to replenish that fire, and then bunk down right here for the rest of ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... the velocity of every atom of matter in the universe (including cerebral matter, i.e., the brain, which is a material thing) are strictly determined, it would not at all follow from the acceptance of this theorem that our mental life is subject to the same necessity. For that to be the case, we should have to show absolutely that a strictly determined psychical state corresponds to a definite cerebral state. This, as we ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... completed. Each of these subjects seemed to have little or no relation to the other; each was kept in a water-tight compartment. He remembers few, if any, of 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
... commodities are always paid for by British commodities, therefore, the purchase of Foreign commodities encourages British industry as much as the purchase of British commodities" (Principles of Political Economy, p. 152). The important exception to this theorem arising from the nature of the commodities exported and imported has been already dealt with. Let us examine the vital principle of the theorem. "The capital," says Adam Smith, "which is employed in purchasing in one part of the country in order to sell ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... critical and learned preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in the footsteps ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... many others we could have adduced, as, columns are cold, they are hard, they are a composition of carbonate of lime, etc. It is only the capacity for such a selection which makes reasoning possible. When, for example, in the demonstration of the theorem of Pythagoras, children handle the various pieces of the metal insets, they should start from the point at which they become aware that a rectangle is equal to the rhomb, and a square is equal to the same rhomb. It is the perception ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... following out the method of the abstract science into minuter details; inserting among its hypotheses a fresh and still more complex combination of circumstances, and so adding pro hac vice a supplementary chapter or appendix, or at least a supplementary theorem, to ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must for every man who counts ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... are equal, and the evolution of nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M. Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment." The above sentence being shown to the Aesthetic Editor aforesaid, he acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... bosom of the woman who had "sorrowed of her sorrows" in all the years of the lonely colorless infancy, childhood, and budding womanhood! The old bookworm clung to the papers as if that "documentary evidence" was an absolute guaranty, and he held it ready to proffer in support of his theorem. His toughened heart-strings were silent at natural affection's touch, and only twanged to the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the six-shooters, and strove barehanded with joy and vigor, which was delightful; yet so systematic, that it was anything rather than romance. It might have been geometry, in that a foe is safer horizontal than perpendicular, and the theorem he applied industriously, with simple faith ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... This latter theorem of taxation which is displayed on the banners of woman suffrage is, I suppose, deliberately and intentionally a suggestio falsi. For only that taxation is tyrannous which is diverted to objects which are not useful to the contributors. And ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... quantitative one. But we know more. We read of weights in the earliest records; and we find weights in ruins of the highest antiquity. Weights imply scales, of which we have also mention; and scales involve the primary theorem of mechanics in its least complicated form—involve not a qualitative but a quantitative prevision of mechanical effects. And here we may notice how mechanics, in common with the other exact sciences, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Anaximander made geographical charts, which required considerable geometrical knowledge. Anaxagoras employed himself in prison in attempting to square the circle. Thales, as has been said, discovered the important theorem that in a right-angled triangle the squares on the sides containing the right angle are together equal to the square on the opposite side of it. Pythagoras discovered that of all figures having the same boundary, the circle among plane figures and the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... own faith. He was still altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Hall, was sometime a Fellow Commoner here. Thomas Forster of Adderstone, general to the "Old Pretender," and commander of the Jacobite army in 1715, entered the College as a Fellow Commoner 3rd July 1700. Brook Taylor, well known to mathematicians as the discoverer of "Taylor's theorem," entered as a Fellow Commoner 3rd April 1701. While David Mossom of Greenwich, who entered the College as a sizar 5th June 1705, after being ordained, emigrated to America, and became rector of St. Peter's Church, New Kent County, Virginia. He was the officiating clergyman at the marriage of ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... Froebel's pedagogical principles undoubtedly appear at first sight a pallid theorem, partly a matter of course, partly impracticable. During our stay in Keilhau we never heard of these claims, concerning which we pupils were the subject of experiment. Far less did we feel that we were being educated according to any fixed method. We perceived very little of any form of government. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... government. This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in France at that moment. His Vindication is meant to be a reduction to an absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it, would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furnishes, that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... has succeeded up to the present time in finding which of the two possible answers is correct. It is interesting to note that in 1911 E. Poincare transmitted a note written by M. Merlin to the Paris Academy of Sciences in which a theorem was announced from which its author deduced that there actually is an infinite number of such prime number pairs, but this result has not been accepted because no definite proof of the theorem ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... opportunity. To the mental training which it gave him was due his success not only as a lawyer, but also as a political orator. Every one of his speeches was as complete a demonstration of its theme as a proposition in Euclid is of its theorem. Lincoln once said that "demonstration" was the greatest word ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... positive, it is not always sufficient to gather the facts, to record them, and to codify in bare formulae the results of inquiry. Doubtless every essential discovery is able to stand by itself; in what would an inventor profit, for example, by raising himself to the level of the artist? "For the theorem lucidity suffices; truth issues naked from the bottom of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... opportunity of that kind, yet bent only on dispensing with it, certainly a most puzzling and comfortless creature. A few only, half discerning what was in his mind, would fain have shared his intellectual clearness, and found a kind of beauty in this youthful enthusiasm for an abstract theorem. Extremes meeting, his cold and dispassionate detachment from all that is most attractive to ordinary minds came to have the impressiveness of a great passion. And for the most part, people had loved ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... expression of our notation, the variable e was augmented, and c x rose proportionally. The law of the variation, according to our theory, would be thus expressed. The resultant was David the king c e x [c r?] (who had been David the shepherd boy), and from the conditions of the theorem we have ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading—a theorem no longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's spirit, to think with him, if one can or will—an expression no longer of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world, prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present, in either case ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... glance could trace no regularity, the young lieutenant was perfectly at home. He fathomed the meaning of every ditch, and formed an entire plan of the fortress from its half-obliterated lines. His description of Ticonderoga would be as accurate as a geometrical theorem, and as barren of the poetry that has clustered round its decay. I viewed Ticonderoga as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a century: where the flags of three nations had successively waved, and none ...
— Old Ticonderoga, A Picture of The Past - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are children's toys. Resolve that you will be men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of materials, builds a house which falls down. The properties of the various mechanical powers are involved in every machine. Every machine, indeed, it has been well said, is a solidified mechanical theorem. The surveyor in determining the limits of one's farm, the architect in planning a house, the builder in planning his estimates, and the several master workmen who do the carpentry, masonry, and finishing, are all dependent upon geometric ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... places the whole of the Veda literature, including the Vedas, the Br[a]hma[n.]as, and the S[u]tras, between 1500 B.C. and 800 B.C., thus agreeing with Buerk[47] who holds that the knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem revealed in the S[u]tras goes back to ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... viii. is a consideration of the 'technical' system, that namely which was accepted by English lawyers; and finally Book ix. deals with a special point, namely, the exclusion of evidence. Bentham announces at starting[419] that he shall establish 'one theorem' and consider two problems. The problems are: 'what securities can be taken for the truth of evidence?' and 'what rules can be given for estimating the value of evidence?' The 'theorem' is that no evidence should be excluded with the professed ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... twenty-seven days, seven hours, forty-three minutes. It is demonstrated, that the moon in its mean motion makes an hundred and fourscore and seven thousand nine hundred and sixty feet (of Paris) in a minute. It is likewise demonstrated, by a known theorem, that the central force which should make a body fall from the height of the moon, would make its velocity no more than fifteen Paris feet in a minute of time. Now, if the law by which bodies gravitate and attract one another in an ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... use in other departments drew him into investigations whose results made it a new science. He reformed its clumsy nomenclature, also the algebraic use of letters for quantities; he introduced system into the use of exponents to denote the powers of a quantity, thus opening the way for the binomial theorem; he was the first to throw clear light on the negative roots of equations; his is the theorem by use of which the maximum number of positive or negative roots of an equation can be ascertained. Analytical geometry originated ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to demonstrate a general theorem, we must give the rule as applied to a particular case; but if we wish to demonstrate a particular case, we must begin with the general rule. For we always find the thing obscure which we wish to prove, and that clear ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... we proceed to speak of Extension, which, considered as relative, is the object of Geometry. The infinite divisibility of finite extension, though it is not expressly laid down either as an axiom or theorem in the elements of that science, yet is throughout the same everywhere supposed and thought to have so inseparable and essential a connexion with the principles and demonstrations in Geometry, that mathematicians never admit it into doubt, ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... prove the above-mentioned theorem respecting motion must be made thus: Take two balls of equal weight and shape and let them fall from a great height so that when they start falling they touch one another, and let the investigator stand on the ground and watch whether the ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... its pride, must consent to lower its bold pretension of claiming assent a priori and depend for assent to the universality of its propositions on the kindness of observers, who, when called as witnesses, would surely not hesitate to admit that what the geometer propounds as a theorem they have always perceived to be the fact, and, consequently, although it be not necessarily true, yet they would permit us to expect it to be true in the future. In this manner Hume's empiricism leads inevitably to scepticism, even ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... that excited the wonder and incredulity of Descartes. Later, he experimented in barometry, and pursued investigations in mechanics. Later still, he made what seemed to be approaches toward Newton's binomial theorem. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson |
