Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Science
Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Mathematics; Mathematics -- Quotations, maxims, etc.
_History of European Thought in the
Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh and
London, 1903), p. 630._
=828.= As there is no study which may be so advantageously
entered upon with a less stock of preparatory knowledge than
mathematics, so there is none in which a greater number of
uneducated men have raised themselves, by their own exertions, to
distinction and eminence.... Many of the intellectual defects
which, in such cases, are commonly placed to the account of
mathematical studies, ought to be ascribed to the want of a
liberal education in early youth.--STEWART, DUGALD.
_Elements of the Philosophy of the Human
Mind, Part 3, chap. 1, sect. 3._
=829.= I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so
antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as
the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from
the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a
talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives
himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he
find himself in a fit state to mathematicize. It is the constant
aim of the mathematician to reduce all his expressions to their
lowest terms, to retrench every superfluous word and phrase, and
to condense the Maximum of meaning into the Minimum of language.
He has to turn his eye ever inwards, to see everything in its
dryest light, to train and inure himself to a habit of internal
and impersonal reflection and elaboration of abstract thought,
which makes it most difficult for him to touch or enlarge upon
any of those themes which appeal to the emotional nature of his
fellow-men. When called upon to speak in public he feels as a man
might do who has passed all his life in peering through a
microscope, and is suddenly called upon to take charge of a
astronomical observatory. He has to get out of himself, as it
were, and change the habitual focus of his vision.
--SYLVESTER, J. J.
_Baltimore Address; Mathematical Papers,
Vol. 3, pp. 72-73._
=830.= An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched
orator.--BARROW, ISAAC.
_Mathematical Lectures (London, 1734),
p. 32._
=831.= _Nemo mathematicus genium indemnatus habebit._ [No
mathematician[2] is esteemed a genius until condemned.]
_Juvenal, Liberii, Satura VI, 562._
[2] Used here in the sense of astrologer, or
soothsayer.
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