Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book

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Macmillan Company, 1914 - Mathematics - 410 pages
 

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Page 334 - Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, | And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
Page 180 - Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Page 54 - Just so it is in the mind ; would you have a man reason well, you must use him to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connection of ideas and following them in train. Nothing does this better than mathematics, which therefore I think should be taught all those who have the time and opportunity, not so much to' make them mathematicians as to make them reasonable creatures...
Page 210 - But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed? Who that shall point as with a wand and say ' This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain...
Page 5 - Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form "p implies q," where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants.
Page 168 - I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Page 368 - In the first course there was a shoulder of mutton, cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboides, and a pudding into a cycloid. The second course was two ducks, trussed up into the form of fiddles; sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hautboys, and a breast of veal in the shape of a harp. The servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures.
Page 242 - Go, wondrous creature! mount where Science guides; Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old Time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th...
Page 326 - Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it — an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis — it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom...
Page 376 - Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. I've read that things inanimate have moved, And, as with living souls, have been informed, By magic numbers and persuasive sound.

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