"Mathematical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mileage within the State bears to its total mileage.[669] To the objection that the mileage formula was inapplicable in this instance because of the disparity of the revenue-producing capacity between the lines in and out of the State, the Court answered that mathematical exactitude in making an apportionment had never been a constitutional requirement. "Wherever," it explained, "the State's taxing authorities have been held to have intruded upon the protected domain of interstate commerce in ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... there is a sufficient reduction of the specifically exciting intravisceral pressure. Just as water flows to its own level, so will conduct flow to reduce intravisceral pressure to its own level. A physics of the soul comes into prospect, in which a mathematical analysis will state the process quantitatively in terms of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... cannot pretend to anything like exactitude; the mathematical figure is a mere figure of speech; it is intended only to emphasize the fact that one of the most momentous changes during the last four centuries has been that from poverty to affluence. That the statement, surprising ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... be conversant with mathematical Books (the printing whereof and musick, has been my chiefest employment), I have observ'd two things many times the cause why Books of this nature appear abroad not so correct as they should be; either ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... eradicate. The matter was represented to her, we are told, 'as if he had set up for a doctor in the faculty and invited young gentlemen into his school, where the Bible was jeered at,' and the use of profane anagrams was inculcated. The fact that he associated with him in his chemical and mathematical studies, and entertained in his house, a scholar labouring at that time under the heavy charge of getting up 'a philosophical theology,' was also made use of ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of opinion existing as to the number of theatres which ought to be licensed in the metropolis. Our friend Peter Borthwick, whose mathematical acquirements are only equalled by his "heavy fathers," has suggested the following formula whereby to arrive at a just conclusion:—Take the number of theatres, multiply by the public-houses, and divide by the dissenting chapels, and the quotient will be the answer. This ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... several examiners had to be executed and others banished beyond the Wall before matters were placed on a satisfactory basis. He also adopted the astronomical system in force in Europe, and he appointed the priest Adam Schaal head of the Mathematical Board at Pekin. But his most important work was the institution of the Grand Council, which still exists, and which is the supreme power under the emperor in the country. It is composed of only four members—two Manchus and two Chinese—who alone possess the privilege of personal audience ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Post.—"The close connection between imagination, humour, and the mathematical faculty has never been ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... had been for years an earnest worker. He carried business plans and business principles into the work; he studied cause and effect, and calculated and expected certain results to follow certain causes, like a mathematical problem; not that he by any means forgot the power of faith, or in any sense attempted to do his work alone. He was a Christian who spent much time on his knees; but little Flossy brought so much of the childlike, unquestioning spirit into her work, that sometimes ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... comes only once a year, and what is needed is an opportunity for daily ebullition, so that each night may square its own account and forestall explosion. Why should there not be, for instance, a military department to every college, as well as a mathematical department? Why might not every college be a military normal school? The exuberance and riot of animal spirits, the young, adventurous strength and joy in being, would not only be kept from striking out as now in illegitimate, unworthy, and hurtful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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 to ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... could manage, but it was obvious what she was really looking at. Her brother held his breath and stared, expecting a pistol might appear and some one be shot dead with a marvellous aim, struck absolutely in the mathematical centre of the heart. Uncle Felix, upon whom fell the burden of rescue or defence, sat there with a curious look upon his face. For a moment it seemed he ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent, must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical figures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience. But to ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Judaism as a form of truth. That being a Jew has always involved conforming to certain principles and modes of life is a truism. But these principles or observances by themselves constitute only the outward expression of Judaism. The mathematical formula which states the law of gravitation is not the same as the force of gravitation itself. It is conceivable that further experimentation might make it necessary to qualify the mathematical formula. But the force of gravitation will ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... myself, I am free to confess that I have seldom been able to feel any absorbing interest in characters who figure merely as the M. or N. of the baptismal service. I shall therefore assign fictitious names to persons and places, and I cannot even pretend to mathematical exactness as to one or two minor details. In reporting conversations, for instance, I do not profess to reproduce the ipsissima verba of the speakers, but merely to give the effect and purport of their discourses. I have, however, been at some pains to be accurate, and I think ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... had received orders to resume the forward movement and my good Chasseurs had taken up the pursuit again, the gunners had lengthened their range with mathematical precision, and the shells burst on the farther side of the ridge. I took a grim pleasure in imagining what must have been happening there, where, no doubt, the division was drawn up, and whilst I continued ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... stared blankly; his features worked as if he were trying to solve a mathematical problem. He started to speak, but his mouth fell open and remained so; his lower lip ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the question of the mutual attractions of all the planets. Lagrange has been able to show, by a mathematical genius that seems little short of omniscience in his single department of knowledge, that there is a discovered system of oscillations, affecting the entire planetary system, the periods of which are immensely long. The number of these oscillations is equal to ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Fisher 583. The design was of a reel in the shape of a rhombus. The learned Judge says "In this case, the reel itself, as an article of manufacture, is conceded to be old and not the subject of a patent. The shape applied to it by the complainant is also an old, well-known mathematical figure. Now although it does not appear that any person ever before applied this particular shape to this particular article, I cannot think that the act quoted above was intended to secure to the complainant an exclusive right ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... factors. Hurst, indeed, has brought forward some facts which suggest that musical sense sometimes behaves as a recessive character, and it is likely that the study of some clean-cut faculty such as the mathematical one would ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... 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 to require ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... fact, did in his "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 constitute a work ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... the first month, exceeded by nearly a quarter, in the second by nearly half, the estimated 600,000 tons, and for the present month also we may fairly cherish the best expectations. The technical success guarantees the economic success with almost mathematical exactitude. True, the economic results cannot be so easily expressed numerically and set down in a few big figures as the technical result in the amount of tonnage sunk. The economic effects of the submarine warfare are expressed in many different spheres covering a wide area, where the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... straight, and wholly devoid of bark, limbs, or foliage. By triangulation Lord Longlegs determined its altitude; Herr Spider measured its circumference at the base and computed the circumference at its top by a mathematical demonstration based upon the warrant furnished by the uniform degree of its taper upward. It was considered a very extraordinary find; and since it was a tree of a hitherto unknown species, Professor Woodlouse gave it a name of a learned sound, being none other than that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... irregularity in the line of the steps which "the artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... he wrote a strong memorial on the subject to his father, who had the good sense to allow him from that time to pursue the path which nature pointed out to him. He continued to reside in London, and about the year 1750 he commenced the business of mathematical instrument maker. In 1751 he invented a machine to measure a ship's way at sea, and a compass of peculiar construction, touched by Dr. Knight's artificial magnet. He made two voyages in company with Dr. Knight ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... not match the body of the text, irregularities in capitalization and hyphenation have not been corrected. Alternate spellings (e.g. Ogilvy vs. Ogilvie), possible errors in quoted passages (e.g. remembraance), and mathematical errors have not been ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading "Little Dorrit" on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... comparatively difficult of entrance, and but imperfectly navigable. The isolation of the Sea Islands is enough to make them still more inconvenient situations than any on the main-land for the foundation of a metropolis. Before we have gone far down this system, we have passed the centre where, on mathematical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... texture of the solar surface. 'Bearing in mind that a second of arc on the Sun represents 455 miles, it follows that an object 150 miles in diameter is about the minimum visible even as a mere mathematical point, and that anything that is sufficiently large to give the slightest impression of shape and extension of surface must have an area of at least a quarter of a million square miles; ordinarily speaking, we shall not gather much information about any object that covers less ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... gentlemen about the table, and soon had suspended above the glass plate an assortment of pocket-knives, watches, and a glass of water, while he chatted with those who were nearest to him, and handed to the scientific members of the council diagrams and mathematical formulae which he hastily scribbled on ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... of the correctness of the theory advanced may, therefore, be considered conclusive, as it amounts, in fact, to a mathematical demonstration. ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... astronomers in the past ages of the world; but the earliest known mention of it occurs in the Britannia Baconica, published by Childrey in 1661. The writer says: 'There is another thing which I recommend to the observation of mathematical men—which is, that in February, and for a little before and a little after that month—as I have observed for several years together—about six in the evening, when the twilight hath almost deserted the horizon, you shall see a plainly discernible ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... contributor will do well to consider that, although the editor may not be an infallible judge, or quite a good judge, it is his business to judge, and to judge without mercy. Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment in an artistic result than in a mathematical result. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which ancient Roman was particularly wanted and would fetch the highest price; and as the band consisted of men of genius of different tastes or faculties,— poetical, historical or narrative, philosophical, grammatical or critical, and scientific or mathematical, if the reward was sufficiently munificent to pay for the time and labour, the highly valued work that was wanted, no matter to what department of literature or science it belonged, was sure to turn up, sooner or later; and if the man ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... home folk speak with the confidence of special revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it, has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He understands at last that ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Courier and Mercury and the New York Journal of Commerce. The latter sheet, at the date of which I am writing, was in wide circulation at the South, its piety (!) and its politics being then calculated with mathematical precision for secession latitudes.) ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the one experience 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 that the person is unable to see any connection between the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... a ponderous pigtail, and her education at the Cluhir Convent School was still uncompleted. The fat, piebald pony that she was riding would have a sore back before she got home. Christian, perched wren-like on her ancient steed (but a wren placed with mathematical accuracy of directness with relation to the steed's ears), noted with disfavour the crooked seat, the heavy hand on the curb. Larry, hot and pink, with hat hanging by its guard, his fair hair looking like storm-tossed corn-stooks, noted nothing, being wholly engrossed in bitter conflict ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... upon which the business should be conducted. There was partial information, it is true, upon certain general facts pertaining to longevity or to mortality laws, under certain conditions, but nothing that could give substantial data upon which to base mathematical calculations for the establishment of a science. Under those conditions, rates of premium were fixed for insurance at the different ages which the experience of many years has shown to be very much higher than is required to meet reasonable ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... arrest. This announcement flashed over the State eleven days before the election. It was a powerful campaign document. People had not realised what an avenging hand pursued Tammany, but they now understood that Tweed was a common thief, and that Tilden, by reducing strong suspicion to a mathematical certainty, had closed the mouths of eulogists ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... in the manner indicated above, both in the embryonic period and later on during the development of each of the organs which forms the organism. This fact shows more than any other the intimate relationship which connects all living organisms. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, is the almost mathematical division of the chromosomes into two halves, a division which results in the equal distribution of their substance through the whole organism. We shall return to this point ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 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
... never let her meddle with Greek, or Hebrew, or algebra, or simony, or fluxions, or paradoxes, or such inflammatory branches of learning—neither would it be necessary for her to handle any of your mathematical, astronomical, diabolical instruments.—But, Sir Anthony, I would send her, at nine years old, to a boarding-school, in order to learn a little ingenuity and artifice. Then, sir, she should have a supercilious ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... about the practice of life, are masters of its theory. Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself; this is the secret law according to which that nation whose sense of life is fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eternal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we are not: what we ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expected to find them on arriving. The tenor and 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 ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... serious! And these artificial lines that men call boundaries, how punctiliously they are guarded! "Take but a hundred feet, and we shall war with thee." How foolish this too must seem when viewed from above—that we should carry on war over even a slight infraction on any imaginary, mathematical line. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... down. It has been the custom of the land-robbing and sea-robbing Anglo-Saxon to give the law to conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh. But in the case of Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak. In the mathematical nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment to be accorded him. The punishment was a foregone conclusion, there could be no doubt of that; and though it was capital, Imber had but one life, while the tale against him was ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... his earliest childhood up to the time I knew him, without one link wanting. His power of calculation, too, was remarkable. 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: so rapid was his calculation. He carried in his head not only a log-book of the whole voyage, in which ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... about at it for three times as long as would be needed to master completely both those tongues if they had "live" teachers, and so they acquire habits of busy futility and petty pedantry in all intellectual processes that haunt them throughout life. There are also sterile mathematical studies that never get from "exercises" to practice. There is a pretence of studying philosophy based on Greek texts that few of the teachers and none of the taught can read comfortably, and a certain amount of history. The ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... requisition in solving astronomical and geometrical problems. We ourselves are debtors to the ancient Egyptians for much of our mathematical knowledge, which has come to us from the banks of the Nile, through ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... 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 ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of the Geometry of Descartes, which contains the application of algebra to the definition and investigation of curve lines (1637), constitutes an epoch in the history of the mathematical sciences. Two years previously, Cavalieri's work on Indivisibles had appeared. This method was improved by Torricelli and others. The way was now open, for the development of the Infinitesimal Calculus, the method of Fluxions of Newton, and the Differential ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... answer the intended design, he would immediately say, after a little examination of the work, "Bobs, man! this won't do, we must have at it again;" and then the whole of that was put aside, and a new instrument, begun. By means of such perseverance, he succeeded in bringing various mathematical, philosophical, and astronomical instruments to perfection. The large theodolite for terrestrial measurements, and the equal altitude instrument for astronomy, will always be monuments of his fertile, penetrating, arduous, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... six weeks, to my room, and, when I was convalescent, it was hinted by the surgeon, in not unintelligible terms, to Mr Root, that if I did not experience the gentlest treatment, I might lose my life; which would have been very immaterial to Mr Root, had it not been a mathematical certainty that he would lose a good scholar at the same time. By-the-by, the meaning that a schoolmaster attaches to the words "good scholar," is one for whom he is paid well. Thus I was emphatically a good scholar; no doubt his very best. I was taught everything—at least his bill ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... young man, as we have seen, possessing marked mathematical talents, and he might have become one of the first scholars of his day, had he enjoyed the advantages of a course of study. Some of the clergymen of Boston showed him much attention on account of his abilities and love of books. ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... twelve 'n' fourteen's—er—twelve—'n'—fourteen—" The unsteady sheepherder was laboring earnestly with the problem. "She ain't no spring chicken, she ain't!" He laughed tipsily, and winked up at the singer, but Billy was not observing him and his mathematical struggles. He refreshed himself from the glass, leaving the contents perceptibly lower—it was a large, thick glass with a handle, and it had flecks of foam down the inside—took a pull at the cigarette and ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... nature from the point of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal standards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects, entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining, and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into prodigious ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... gate at Lucca, of the vault at Verona, of this window at Orvieto, and of the contemporary refectory at Furness Abbey, are a main source of the pleasure you have in the building. Nay, they are not merely engravers' lines, but, in finest practice, they are mathematical lines —length without breadth. Here in my hand is a little shaft of Florentine mosaic executed at the present day. The separations between the stones are, in dimension, mathematical lines. And the two ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... his original dogma as to the triple constituents of the universe, and say "that it may be almost doubted whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] entity." [60] "It is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were floating in an ocean of ether, causing waves in it by their own proper movement," ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... a great man!" cried Barker, rising also. "You've knocked me sensible again. I am ashamed to say it, but I was getting romantic. Of course, what you say is adamantine sense. Fighting, being physical, must be mathematical. We were beaten because we were neither mathematical nor physical nor anything else—because we deserved to be beaten. Hold all the approaches, and with our force we must have him. When shall we open the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... inclined to ascribe the creation of that world to inspiration rather than to what is currently known as common sense. For the natural history sciences the definition may stand—hardly for the physical and mathematical sciences. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts, nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... raise an 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 ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... she said. "I always like to have a thing first-class of its kind, though I can't pride myself that it compares with your Spanish accent, Edgar; that stands absolutely alone and unapproachable for badness. I don't worry about my mathematical stupidity a bit since I read Dr. Holmes, who says that everybody has an idiotic area in ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... insurance, but its application to the facts of life, mind, variation, evolution, etc., is only begun. Its neglect in psychology is one of the crying defects of much recent work. Its use in complicated problems involves a mathematical training which people generally do not possess; and its misuse through lack of exactness of observation or ignorance of the requirements is worse than ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... for his instruments, and himself to make the well-known telescope, which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship. Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations. Linnaeus became a botanist while helping his father—a practical gardener—in his daily work. In short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract researches—it rather ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust; - why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet? Mystery inexplicable on the conceited notion which, making man forsooth the centre of the universe, dares to believe that this variety of forms ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... terrace one can overlook both Foggia and Castel Fiorentino—the beginning and end of the drama; and one follows the march of this magnificent retribution without a shred of compassion for the gloomy papal hireling. Disaster follows disaster with mathematical precision, till at last he perishes miserably, consumed by rage and despair. Then ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous peace of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture! Why can't they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-working Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which could provoke so unpatriotic ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 with all the dignity of monarchs they moved away from each other. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... when a child, carried off by gipsies, and remained some hours in their possession.] was not to be tolerated; and accordingly, though the charge was contrary to all his habits of life, he readily undertook it, and might be seen stalling about with a mathematical problem in his head, and his eye upon a child of five years old, whose rambles led him into a hundred awkward situations. Twice was the Dominie chased by a cross-grained cow, once he fell into the brook crossing at the stepping-stones, and another time was bogged ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... policy had persuaded the Kaiser's advisers that America would not intervene; and the likelihood of rapidly starving Great Britain was so great—indeed the Germans had reduced the situation to a mathematical calculation of success—that an American declaration of war seemed to Berlin to be a matter of no particular importance. The American Ambassador in London regarded Bernstorff's dismissal much more ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... silence followed this ultimatum, then Caradoc said, "Oh, it's possible, I suppose. The mathematical formula of possibility would work out about ten million chances ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... for the sufferings they have inflicted on the Jews. And he explains this resurrection of bodies to be only of the original stamen of Leibnitz, or the human calus in semine masculino, considering that as a mathematical point, insusceptible of separation or division. The second resurrection, a general one of souls and bodies, eternally to enjoy divine glory in the presence of the Supreme Being. He alleges that the Jews alone preserve the doctrine of the unity of God. Yet their God would be ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... successively employed in this vocation at Frankford, in Pennsylvania, at Milestown, and at Bloomfield, in New Jersey. In preparing himself for the instruction of others, he essentially extended his own acquaintance with classical learning, and mathematical science; and by occasional employment as a land-surveyor, he somewhat improved his finances. In 1801, he accepted the appointment of teacher in a seminary in Kingsessing, on the river Schuylkill, about four miles from ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... see," said Crashaw, "that this instance of yours, Mr. Challis, has any real bearing on the situation. If the child is a mathematical genius—there have been instances in history, such as Blaise Pascal—he would not, of course, receive elementary instruction in a subject with ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... excess,' has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form. That the good is of the nature of the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic sentiment, which may be compared with the language of those modern writers who speak of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to law. The mathematical or logical notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and even finds a mythological expression in the conception of envy (Greek). Ideas of measure, equality, order, unity, proportion, still linger in the writings of moralists; and the true spirit of the fine arts is better conveyed by ...
— The Republic • Plato
... me," I said, "by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the Greek poet, "but nought more wonderful than man, all-inventive man!" And surely, among many wonders wrought out by human endeavor, there are few of higher interest than that splendid system of mathematical science, the growth of so many slow-revolving ages and toiling hands, still incomplete, destined to remain so forever perhaps, but to-day embracing within its wide circuit many marvellous trophies wrung ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... paused, peered from beneath bushy white brows out over the laboratory. To his near sighted eyes the blurred figure of Harper, his young assistant, seemed busily at work over his mathematical charts. Gault hoped sourly that the young man was actually working and not just drawing more of his absurd, senseless designs ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... I found my friend Collins, who had arriv'd there some time before me. We had been intimate from children, and had read the same books together; but he had the advantage of more time for reading and studying, and a wonderful genius for mathematical learning, in which he far outstript me. While I liv'd in Boston, most of my hours of leisure for conversation were spent with him, and he continu'd a sober as well as an industrious lad; was much respected for his learning by several of the clergy and other gentlemen, and seemed to ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... to divide a pie with mathematical exactness into quarters or sixths. A better way is to cut out one piece of the usual size and offer it, and then if less be desired, cut off such ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... my literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed, there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches which subside into printed characters, apparently forming distinct words, arranged in straight lines as in a printed book; the monosyllables are often legible. This ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Menelaus, and other shields described in the same words, "every way equal," the epithet is not now allowed to mean "circular." Mr. Leaf, annotating Iliad, I. 306, says that this sense is "intolerably mathematical and prosaic," and translates [Greek: panton eesae] as "well balanced on every side." Helbig renders the epithets in the natural sense, as "circular." [Footnote: Helbig, Homerische Epos, p. 315; cf., on the other hand, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... to a story by the great American romancer, which is a masterpiece. Who has not read the "Gold Bug?" In this novel a cryptogram, composed of ciphers, letters, algebraic signs, asterisks, full-stops, and commas, is submitted to a truly mathematical analysis, and is deciphered under extraordinary conditions, which the admirers of that strange genius can never forget. On the reading of the American document depended only a treasure, while on that of this one depended ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... was one of happy quiet, and I spent it without leaving the castle, being engaged in instructing my Hebe on the nature of the sphere, and in preparing her for the beauties of Wolf. I presented her with my case of mathematical instruments, which seemed to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... information is presented in [10]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 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with no one. What I thought of doing was of sinking a shaft through the earth's crust, and of establishing rapid communication with the Antipodes. When you had got a certain distance down—how far is an interesting mathematical problem—the centre of gravity would be beneath you, presuming that your boring was not quite directed towards the centre, and you could then lay down rails and tunnel as if you ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... interest attached at that time to the question whether the ring is divided or not, for Laplace had then recently published the results of his mathematical inquiry into the movements of such a ring as Saturn's, and, having proved that a single solid ring of such enormous width could not continue to move around the planet, had expressed the opinion that Saturn's ring consists in reality of many concentric rings, each turning, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"—makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask—in fact, the "love of HIS wisdom," to translate the term fairly and squarely—in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... conclusion by laborious and careful fluxionary calculation. To his surprise, and to the surprise of the world, such lines and such a building were found in the common bee cell. Now I hold that the same Creator who gave to the bee the mathematical instinct could endow man with the instinct of speech. Even to animal instinct we find a certain variation and permitted latitude in what is called adaptive instinct. So in man we find this same instinct of adaptation in a higher sense. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... relieve Hansen. He left Lund primed for resistance against Carlsen, against all the crew, if necessary, resolved to save the girl, but, as Lund stayed below and the time slid by, his confidence oozed out of him, and the odds assumed their mathematical proportion. ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... Cherbury. But it was not till the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to France on the eve of the great Rebellion in 1642, that his speculations were made known to the world in his treatise "De Cive." He joined the exiled Court at Paris, and became mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love and regard for him seem to have been real to the end. But his post was soon forfeited by the appearance of his "Leviathan" in 1651; he was forbidden to approach the Court, and returned ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... Crittenden, and he got up, stepping into a fragrant foot-bath of cold dew and out to a dapple gray wash-basin that sat on three wooden stakes just outside. Sousing his head, he sniffed in the chill air and, looking below him, took in, with pure mathematical delight, the working unit of the army as it came to life. The very camp was the symbol of order and system: a low hill, rising from a tiny stream below him in a series of natural terraces to the fringe of low pines behind him, and on these terraces ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... electrical lines—literally composed of electricity—lines the nearest approach to your definition of a mathematical line, that which hath length ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the impulse that keeps it in motion is the same, and the book-maker's slate is as dangerous as the roulette-table. The manager of the one piles up a fortune as surely as the director of the other, and in both cases the money seems to be made with an almost mathematical certainty and regularity. They tell of one day—that of the Grand Prix of 1877—when Saffery, the Steel of the French turf and the leviathan of bookmakers, cleared as much as fifty thousand dollars. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... pointed out that the presence of the yolk in the frog's egg led to a difference in the size of the cells at the animal and vegetable poles. The late F.M. Balfour, borrowing a mathematical technicality, suggested that the rate of segmentation in any part of an ovum varies inversely with the amount of yolk. In the fowl's egg, except just at the germinal area, the active protoplasm is at a minimum, the inert yolk at a maximum; the ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... made against dogs by some uncompromising food economists, 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 day. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... mahogany-appearing sideboard reached the ceiling. Upon its shelves rested pyramids of shimmering glasses that were never disturbed. Mirrors set in the face of the sideboard multiplied them. Lemons, oranges and paper napkins, arranged with mathematical precision, sat among the glasses. Many-hued decanters of liquor perched at regular intervals on the lower shelves. A nickel-plated cash register occupied a position in the exact centre of the general effect. The elementary senses of it all seemed to be ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... symbols which they are in the habit of using, and scientists are constantly confusing objective things with the subjective formulas for them. After the physicist has set up correspondences between physical facts and mathematical formulas, the "interpretation" of these formulas is his most ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... 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 Wisdom ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... "It is a self-evident mathematical proposition. The more people a loaf of bread or any given thing is divided among, and the more equally it is divided, the sooner it will be consumed and more bread be called for. To put it in a more formal way, the needs ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... "Moderates," but it will be seen from the above quotation that she has travelled far from the old ideals which invested women with many beautiful qualities, but not with the sense and knowledge required of useful public citizens. She proceeds in the same article to say that scientific and mathematical teaching should reach a higher standard in girls' schools; and thirdly, that certain branches of psychology, physiology, and hygiene should receive greater attention, because a woman is a better wife and mother when she fulfils her duties with understanding instead of by mere ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... was the measure of reliance that the French General Staff and General Michel placed on the Namur forts, evidently General von Buelow regarded them as little more than passing targets for his siege guns. He seemed to have made a comparatively simple mathematical calculation of almost the number of shells necessary to fire, and the hours to be consumed in reducing the Namur forts to masses ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... different type of poetry to that exhibited in 'Jabberwocky.' Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements, ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... in their study, looking out at the linnets flitting about the garden, and at the primroses and blue violets which grew in front of the windows. The lessons of the day were over, and the Doctor was pursuing his favorite amusement, namely, drawing mathematical deductions, and coming to logical conclusions upon all matters. Although he was a ripe scholar, he would frequently forget himself, and break out in his strong Scotch accent; but that signified nothing, as Cecil perfectly understood his speech, and the family ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... the facts made known to us by experience alone, and which are therefore in the nature of contingent truths, resting upon contingent evidence, while all demonstrations a priori must necessarily proceed upon mathematical truths. Let us now see if their labors have been more successful in applying to the solution of the ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... the contention of Benfeius "will be bound, in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable." This, Father, is "one for Benfeius," as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that these matters "admit of almost mathematical precision," it would seem that Benfeius is but a Dummkopf, as the Alemanni say, in their own language, when they would ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... published volume, "Logical Control: The Computer vs. Brain" (Silliman Memorial Lecture Series, 1957), with the hope that you can perhaps offer me some advice and also publish this letter in the editorial section. Your mathematical viewpoint on the analysis between computing machines and the living human brain, especially the conclusion that the brain operates in part digitally and in part analogically, using its own statistical language involving selection, conditional transfer orders, branching, and control sequence ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield
... interests of the king," Lally drew himself up to his full height, exclaiming, "Never, never!" He was expending his wrath in insults heaped upon his enemies, when, suddenly drawing from his pocket a pair of mathematical compasses, he struck it violently against his heart; the wound did not go deep enough; M. de Lally was destined to drink to the dregs ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... case were these. It was the custom of the mathematical set to which J. S. M. Babington belonged, 4B to wit, to relieve the tedium of the daily lesson with a species of round game which was played as follows. As soon as the master had taken his seat, one of the players ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... mathematical school was Euclid; who is, however, less known to us by what his pupils have said of him than by his own invaluable work on geometry. This is one of the few of the scientific writings of the ancients ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... essentially of picturesque metaphors, or of moral advice, of love and malice, and that we have to sift big volumes before we strike a bit of psychological truth; even then, how often it has shown itself haphazard and accidental, vague and distorted! The mathematical statistics of the professional students of the mind and their test experiments in the laboratories are certainly less picturesque, but they have the one advantage that the results are true. Mankind has no right to deceive ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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 had made him so. ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and it was welcomed by the Chinese Foreign Office as a timely guide in their new situation. He followed this up by versions of Woolsey, Bluntschli and Hall. He also gave them a popular work on natural philosophy—not a translation—together with a more extended work on mathematical physics. Not only has the former appeared in many editions from the Chinese press, but it has been often reprinted in Japan; and to this day maintains its place in the favour of both empires. To this he has lately added ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... 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 alone in such a desolate place. He built himself two huts of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... can never be the 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 ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... boy knew all about it. Figures, statistics, results, conclusions, were shown in a steady, flowing, accurate, lucid manner. The young man knew his theme—every byway, highway and tracing of it. By that speech he proved his mathematical genius, and blazed the way straight to the office of Chancellor of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... of them on the payroll of his Management. Khouzhik was having his hands full. He had all his top mathematical experts, some of whom even understood the use of the slide-rule, trying to work up a scale of wages. Erskyll loaned him a few of his staff. None of the ideas any of them developed proved workable. Khouzhik had also organized a corps of investigators, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... wise. Selecting a spot near the banks of the numerous lakes in which this region abounds, and where the water is about 4 inches deep, and still, she builds, with her tail and snout, a circular embankment 3 inches in height and 2 thick. The circle, which is as perfect a one as could be formed with mathematical instruments, is usually a foot and a half in diameter; and at one side of this circular wall an opening is left by the fish of just sufficient width ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... to a moral," said Gerald, who was sitting at the round table opposite to his father. Mr. Boncassen, who was next to him, asked, in irony probably rather than in ignorance, whether the victory was to be achieved by mathematical or classical proficiency. Gerald turned and looked at him. "Do you mean to say that you have never ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... and its immortality, that consolatory hope of persecuted virtue, be nothing more than amiable and splendid chimeras? But in how much obscurity are these difficult problems involved? What accumulated objections arise when we wish to examine them with mathematical rigor? No! it is not given to the human mind to behold these truths in the full day of perfect evidence; but why should the man of sensibility repine at not being able to demonstrate what he feels to be true? ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... understand this cruel riddle; I cannot comprehend why they all make themselves unhappy and why they all serve a malicious demon with a thorny sceptre, why Charlotte, who strews incense before him daily, yes, hourly, should prepare misfortune for them all with mathematical precision! Is not love free? Are those two not affinities? Why should she prevent them from living this innocent life with and near each other? They are twins; twined round each other they ripen ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... if all this were true, cousin," answered Montrose, "there is something convenient in commanding a soldier, upon whose motives and springs of action you can calculate to a mathematical certainty. A fine spirit like yours, my cousin, alive to a thousand sensations to which this man's is as impervious as his corslet,—it is for such that thy friend must feel, while he gives his advice." Then, suddenly ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... give sensations of color which vary with the rapidity or length of the wave, and certain combinations of wave lengths will be harmonious (beautiful), and others will not be. This is a matter of scientific fact; it is not a notion. The mathematical relations of color waves have been calculated as accurately as the relations of sound waves have been. It is possible to make combinations of mathematical figures which shall represent a series of harmonious color waves. And it is possible to measure ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... made glad, even in advance, whenever they had Business at Penly, as expecting a refreshment of this Cordial Malt Liquor, that often was accompany'd with a good Breakfast or Dinner besides, while several others that had greater Estates would seem generous by giving a Yeoman Man Neighbour, the Mathematical Treat of a look on the Spit, and a standing ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... of time, for he would have been much better employed in looking after his men, and any boy could have transcribed his ledger. But no, it was characteristic of the man that he preferred this occupation—that he took the utmost pains to write his best copybook hand, and to rule red-ink lines with mathematical accuracy. Two days after the quarter a bill went to the builder, beginning, "To account delivered." The builder was astonished, and instantly posted down to the shop, receipt in hand, signed, "For J. Furze, T. C." Mr. Furze looked at his ledger again, called for the day-book, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... to all the propositions that I wish, and we shall come to an undeniable and mathematical conclusion. Observe, law-makers should not be law-breakers. Who enacted these laws?—the aristocracy of the nation, seated in their respective houses, the Lords and the Commons. Go, any night you please, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 3rd. After visiting his mother, and settling an allowance of nine shillings per week for her support, he resided for a short time at Rotherham, in Yorkshire, where an iron bridge was cast and erected upon a model of his invention, which obtained him great reputation for his mathematical skill. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... the Secretary of the Navy, in which the humiliating weakness of the present organization of his Department is exhibited and the startling abuses and waste of its present methods are exposed. The conviction is forced upon us with the certainty of mathematical demonstration that before we proceed further in the, restoration of a Navy we need a thoroughly reorganized Navy Department. The fact that within seventeen years more than $75,000,000 have been spent in the construction, repair, equipment, and armament ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... investigation that accounts for much of Rousseau's sophistry. His truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulae, assumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... after him; entered a mathematical instrument maker's shop in the neighbouring street, and pointed out a heavy corded case to Lancelot, who, with the assistance of the shopman, got it on his shoulders; and trudging forth through the streets after his employer, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... 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 was followed ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the things we see, or think we see, are themselves but symbols, reflections as from a mirror, and how we must make them out as best we can for the present, knowing that, in due season, we shall see the realities for which these things stand to the human mind. He knew that back of the mathematical symbols stood the eternal, unvarying, indestructible principles which govern their use. And he had begun to see that back of the symbols, the phenomena, of human existence stands the great principle—infinite God—the eternal mind. In the realm of mathematics the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of the men of science would consent to confront it with their own handiwork? Who of them would recognise the superiority and greater trustworthiness of the Adept's knowledge over their own hypotheses, since in their case they can claim the mathematical correctness of their deductive reasonings based on the alleged unerring precision of the modern instruments; while the Adepts can claim but their knowledge of the ultimate nature of the materials they have worked with for ages, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... taking out the twenties and carrying them on; but when he came to the pounds, where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error. The bulk of mankind are school-boys through life. These little perplexities are always great to them. And even mathematical heads feel the relief of an easier, substituted for a more difficult process. Foreigners, too, who trade or travel among us, will find a great facility in understanding our coins and accounts from this ratio of subdivision. Those ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to be as theoretically possible as it is practically impossible. Archimedes would have required to move with the velocity of a cannon-ball for millions of ages to alter the position of the earth by the smallest part of an inch. In mathematical truth, however, the feat is performed by every man who leaps from the ground; for he kicks the world away when he rises, and attracts it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... my consciousness, been solving the difficulties. This experience is by no means a peculiar one. Many scientific workers have borne testimony to a similar habit of the cerebrum. The late Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, the discoverer of the mathematical method known as that of the quaternions, states that his mind suddenly solved that problem after long work when he was thinking of something else. He says in one place: "Tomorrow will be the fifteenth birthday of the quaternions. They started into life or light full grown ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... on which Mark felt unusual concern. Bob knew nothing whatever of navigation. It was impossible to teach him anything on that subject. He knew the points of the compass, but had no notion of the variations, of latitude or longitude, or of anything belonging to the purely mathematical part of the business. Twenty times had he asked Mark to give him the latitude and longitude of the crater; twenty times had he been told what they were, and just as often had he forgotten them. When questioned by ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... of this review come by any chance under the notice of some of those learned gentlemen who are delving among Greek roots or working out abstruse mathematical problems in the great academic seats on the banks of the Cam or Isis, they would probably wonder what can be said on the subject of the intellectual development of a people engaged in the absorbing practical work of a Colonial dependency. To such eminent scholars Canada is probably only remarkable ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... Colouring is true where it is naturally adapted to the eye, from brightness, from softness, from harmony, from resemblance; because these agree with their object, nature, and therefore are true: as true as mathematical demonstration; but known to be true only to ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... was formally announced, the boy Marquis was taken to call at the house of his future wife, and was presented to her in the garden. Formal paths wound under a row of chestnut-trees, carefully tended flower-beds were arranged with mathematical precision, a few peacocks strutted across the lawn, and here and there a marble statue or a great stone jar from Italy gave a classic touch to ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... essentially a benefit to himself (Exodus xxiii. 18; Genesis iv. 4, WMXBLHN). For the first-fruits of the field Exodus prescribes no measure at all, Deuteromony demands the tithe of corn, wine, and oil, which, however, is not to be understood with mathematical strictness, inasmuch as it is used at sacrificial meals, is not made over to a second party, and thus does not require to be accounted for. The tithe, as appears from Deuteronomy xxvi., is offered in autumn, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... composed, that there was scarcely need even of cement. Without noise or confusion or sound of hammers did those temples rise, since all their parts were cut and carved in the distant quarries, and with mathematical precision. And within the cella, nearly concealed by surrounding columns, were the statues of the gods, and the altars on which incense was offered, or sacrifices made. In every part, interior and exterior, do we see a matchless proportion and beauty, whether in the shaft or the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord |
