Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Science
Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Mathematics; Mathematics -- Quotations, maxims, etc.
On poetry and geometric truth,
And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,
I mused; upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,
Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
--WORDSWORTH.
_The Prelude, Bk. 5._
=1118.= Geometry seems to stand for all that is practical, poetry
for all that is visionary, but in the kingdom of the imagination
you will find them close akin, and they should go together as a
precious heritage to every youth.--MILNER, FLORENCE.
_School Review, 1898, p. 114._
=1119.= The beautiful has its place in mathematics as elsewhere.
The prose of ordinary intercourse and of business correspondence
might be held to be the most practical use to which language is
put, but we should be poor indeed without the literature of
imagination. Mathematics too has its triumphs of the creative
imagination, its beautiful theorems, its proofs and processes
whose perfection of form has made them classic. He must be a
“practical” man who can see no poetry in mathematics.
--WHITE, W. F.
_A Scrap-book of Elementary Mathematics
(Chicago, 1908), p. 208._
=1120.= I venture to assert that the feelings one has when the
beautiful symbolism of the infinitesimal calculus first gets a
meaning, or when the delicate analysis of Fourier has been
mastered, or while one follows Clerk Maxwell or Thomson into the
strange world of electricity, now growing so rapidly in form and
being, or can almost feel with Stokes the pulsations of light
that gives nature to our eyes, or track with Clausius the courses
of molecules we can measure, even if we know with certainty that
we can never see them--I venture to assert that these feelings
are altogether comparable to those aroused in us by an exquisite
poem or a lofty thought.--WORKMAN, W. P.
_F. Spencer: Aim and Practice of
Teaching (New York, 1897), p. 194._
=1121.= It is an open secret to the few who know it, but a
mystery and stumbling block to the many, that Science and Poetry
are own sisters; insomuch that in those branches of scientific
inquiry which are most abstract, most formal, and most remote
from the grasp of the ordinary sensible imagination, a higher
power of imagination akin to the creative insight of the poet is
most needed and most fruitful of lasting work.--POLLOCK, F.
_Clifford’s Lectures and Essays (New
York, 1901), Vol. 1, Introduction, p.
1._
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