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These men all worked the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves.
I had also got through the first six books of Euclid after a fashion, and had advanced as far as quadratic equations in algebra, but had no mathematical talent whatever. My mother would not hear of trade as an occupation for me, and she could not afford to make me a soldier, sailor, doctor, lawyer, or parson.
It was no longer feared lest, as Sydney Smith puts it, if a woman learnt algebra she would "desert her infant for a quadratic equation;" and the University of Cambridge soon fell in with the scheme for the Higher Education of Women; while Miss Faithfull, and several others, organized methods for employing practically the talents which education could only develope in a general way.
The cars proceed, in perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be arranged to demonstrate a theory.
I can find pleasure in a motor-car, but I hate even the risk of accidents. I have no objection to an income, but I hate investments. And so on. All I ask is to live simply and sensibly, but instead of that my existence is transformed into a quadratic equation. And I can't stop it. My happiness is not increasing it's decreasing.
Sir Isaac Newton was paying his little yearly call at Grantham; and was seated in a rustic arbor by the side of Mrs. Vincent, now grown gray, and the mother of a goodly brood, well grown up. As they thus sat talking of days agone, his thoughts wandered off upon quadratic equations, and to aid his mind in following the thread, he absent-mindedly lighted his pipe, and smoked in silence.
Cardan tried all his ingenuity over this combination without success, but his brilliant pupil, Ludovico Ferrari, worked to better purpose, and succeeded at last in solving it by adding to each side of the equation, arranged in a certain fashion, some quadratic and simple quantities of which the square root could be extracted.
This stripling, who was at least five years my junior, proposed to me out of sheer gratitude. I actually succeeded in drumming quadratic equations into his stupid head, and he offered me his hand by the way of reward." Grace's sad expression had by this time vanished. She was regarding Emma with a smiling face. "Really and truly, Emma, did that happen to you?"
Thus admirably circumstanced in the matter of instructors, and aided by his own anxiety to improve, Bob made such steady and rapid progress that by the time the ship rounded the Cape he could "work a lunar," solve a quadratic equation or any problem in the first two books of Euclid, and write an intelligently expressed, correctly spelt, and grammatical letter, in addition to possessing a large store of knowledge on everyday subjects.
I overheard one of my urchins, clattering in front of me, shout to another: "I'm sure he's got the sack!" Turning round he perceived me, and grew as red as a turkey-cock. I laughed aloud. The boy's yell was a clarion announcement from the seventh heaven. I had got the sack! I should never teach him quadratic equations again.
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