United States or Nauru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


I heard lectures on applied mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, mineralogy, botany, natural history, physics, chemistry, accounts, cultivation of forest trees and management of forests, architecture, house-building, and land-surveying. I continued topographical drawing.

They are like those sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works itself out into perfectly good sense. I know now that I really never got any older than the poor, foolish, eighteen-years child that Aunt Adeline married off "safe."

It means history, geography, physics, chemistry, natural history, mineralogy, Latin, Greek, French, arithmetic, algebra, Euclid, and goodness knows how many more things, jammed in at so much a pound. It means taking a child, shaking everything out of its head, and then stuffing every nook and corner with facts it will never be able to remember, and with dates for which it cannot have any use.

Gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite time and space.

In our day, if a man had invented arithmetic, algebra, or the decimal system, he would have obtained no patent; but Bareme would have had a right of property in his Computations. Pascal, for his theory of the weight of the atmosphere, would not have been patented; instead of him, a glazier would have obtained the privilege of the barometer.

And here precisely is that which constitutes the inflexible rigour of the calculus, the luminous certainty before which every cultivated mind is forced to bow. Algebra is the oracle of the absolute truth, because it reveals nothing but what the mind had hidden in it under an amalgam of symbols. We put 2 and 2 into the machine; the rollers work and show us 4. That is all.

The reason we shall need a little algebra, as it were, is that many psycho-analysts have fallen into confused ways of regarding their signs and significations. Consider, for example, the reputed signs of the birth-phantasy, as listed by Freud:

Laplace and Biot belong to our own day; but their task, too, consisted in the employment of old rules. The most effective tools of the mathematician are framed from the Arab algebra and Napier's logarithms. The science itself without application is, like logic, a soul without a body. The field most fruitful under its application is that of astronomy. Here, progress has been great.

The same theory, that accounts for the love of truth in mathematics and algebra may be extended to morals, politics, natural philosophy, and other studies, where we consider not the other abstract relations of ideas, but their real connexions and existence.

"If I knew Euclid; and when I said I didn't know him, he said, `Oh dear me! Then he asked me if I knew Algebra, and I said I didn't, and he shook his head at me and said, `Dear me! dear me! and that he would have to pull me up. I say, what have I done to be pulled up!" "Don't you know that Euclid wrote a work on Geometry, and that Algebra is a study by which calculations are made!"