United States or Kazakhstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Farquhar was a capital navigator and excellent mathematician; was strong, energetic, and clever. The next thing I was engaged upon was to enlist, arm, and equip, a faithful escort of twenty men for the road. Johari, the chief dragoman of the American Consulate, informed me that he knew where certain of Speke's "Faithfuls" were yet to be found.
The Honorable Robert Boyle, a scientist of unquestioned seriousness, tells in his New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects about Drebel's work in the quaint language of his time: But yet on occasion of this opinion of Paracelsus, perhaps it will not be impertinent if, before I proceed, I acquaint your Lordship with a conceit of that deservedly famous mechanician and Chymist, Cornelius Drebel, who, among other strange things that he perform'd, is affirm'd, by more than a few credible persons, to have contrived for the late learned King James, a vessel to go under water; of which, trial was made in the Thames, with admired success, the vessel carrying twelve rowers, besides passengers; one which is yet alive, and related it to an excellent Mathematician that informed me of it.
So I say that the mathematician who is, even more than you, a man of science, a man of a more infallible science the mathematician would conclude that wisdom was not with you doctors, but with me." "You believe it, sir!" exclaimed the other. "But you deceive yourself." And he continued, driving home his point with a finger which seemed to George to pierce his very soul.
There is one man of genius who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated: I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time.
Where once one ancient witch-doctress may have been the only creature in a whole district who studied the nature of herbs and earths, or a solitary wizard experimenting on poisons was the only individual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later, a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examining the structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousands of men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel the mysteries of nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, the anatomist, the engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, the electrician, form a mighty and always increasingly important army of male labourers.
The mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as the one who grinds a reflector. In all our life the same tendency is to be seen: the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of the brain.
I would be a tolerable Mathematician. I would thoroughly understand Mechanics; Hydrostatics; Optics, and Astronomy; Botany; Metallurgy; Fossilism; Chemistry; Geology; Anatomy; Medicine; then the mind of man; then the minds of men, in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years; the next five in the composition of the poem, and the five last in the correction of it.
He came back a tall, slender youth, with a very large head, to be spoken of in London as an encyclopaedia of information, a wonderful mathematician and mechanician, teeming with schemes of all sorts, and yet shrewd, practical, and business-like. He was an invaluable addition to the Invisible College, and a delightful discovery for Hartlib; and he took to Hartlib at once, as every one else did.
Berkeley's voice grew a little stiffer and colder as he answered, 'She was a sister of Oswald of Oriel, the great mathematician, who was killed last year by falling from the summit of a peak in the Bernina. 'Oh, yes, yes, I know all about that, of course, said Lady Hilda, quickly and carelessly.
Tycho exhibited the same good feeling; and the kindness of Hoffman, President of the States of Styria, completed the reconciliation of the two astronomers. On his return to Prague in 1601, he was presented by Tycho to the Emperor, who conferred upon him the title of Imperial Mathematician, on the condition that he would assist Tycho in his calculations.
Word Of The Day