Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Science
Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Mathematics; Mathematics -- Quotations, maxims, etc.
[4] The mathematical tendencies of Cambridge are
due to the fact that Cambridge drains the
ability of nearly the whole Anglo-Danish
district.
=837.= In the whole history of the world there was never a race
with less liking for abstract reasoning than the Anglo-Saxon....
Common-sense and compromise are believed in, logical deductions
from philosophical principles are looked upon with suspicion, not
only by legislators, but by all our most learned professional
men.--PERRY, JOHN.
_The Teaching of Mathematics (London,
1902), pp. 20-21._
=838.= The degree of exactness of the intuition of space may be
different in different individuals, perhaps even in different
races. It would seem as if a strong naïve space-intuition were an
attribute pre-eminently of the Teutonic race, while the critical,
purely logical sense is more fully developed in the Latin and
Hebrew races. A full investigation of this subject, somewhat on
the lines suggested by _Francis Galton_ in his researches on
heredity, might be interesting.--KLEIN, FELIX.
_The Evanston Colloquium Lectures (New
York, 1894), p. 46._
=839.= This [the fact that the pursuit of mathematics brings into
harmonious action all the faculties of the human mind] accounts
for the extraordinary longevity of all the greatest masters of
the Analytic art, the Dii Majores of the mathematical Pantheon.
Leibnitz lived to the age of 70; Euler to 76; Lagrange to 77;
Laplace to 78; Gauss to 78; Plato, the supposed inventor of the
conic sections, who made mathematics his study and delight, who
called them the handles or aids to philosophy, the medicine of
the soul, and is said never to have let a day go by without
inventing some new theorems, lived to 82; Newton, the crown and
glory of his race, to 85; Archimedes, the nearest akin, probably,
to Newton in genius, was 75, and might have lived on to be 100,
for aught we can guess to the contrary, when he was slain by the
impatient and ill-mannered sergeant, sent to bring him before the
Roman general, in the full vigour of his faculties, and in the
very act of working out a problem; Pythagoras, in whose school, I
believe, the word mathematician (used, however, in a somewhat
wider than its present sense) originated, the second founder of
geometry, the inventor of the matchless theorem which goes by his
name, the pre-cognizer of the undoubtedly mis-called Copernican
theory, the discoverer of the regular solids and the musical
canon who stands at the very apex of this pyramid of fame, (if we
may credit the tradition) after spending 22 years studying in
Egypt, and 12 in Babylon, opened school when 56 or 57 years old
in Magna Græcia, married a young wife when past 60, and died,
carrying on his work with energy unspent to the last, at the age
of 99. The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of
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