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Updated: May 15, 2025
I grasped very well the fact that a plus quantity killed a minus quantity if they were of equal value, and that a little figure two by the side of a letter meant its square, and I somehow blundered through some simple equations, but when Mr Hasnip lit a scholastic fire under me, and began to force on bigger mathematical flowers from my unhappy soil in the Doctor's scholastic hothouse, I began to feel as if I were blighted, and as if quadratic equations were instruments of torture to destroy boys' brains.
He was rather proud of them, seeing he had utterly forgotten now how to work decimal fractions, and could not have done a quadratic equation to save his life. "Still, I don't think you need be quite discouraged, Pip. I was rather beyond the other boys in my class in these subjects, I remember.
Also, it is admitted, when consciousness suffused his brain with a thought, that the thought was dimmer, vaguer than a similar thought in a human brain. Furthermore, it is admitted that never, never, in a million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a proposition in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation.
Surmounting their short, thick necks were large quadratic heads with yellow, rapaciously curved beaks and round, fierce, heavy looking eyes. The female was the smaller. Her legs were more slender and handsome, and there was a kind of rough, heavy gracefulness in the curves of her neck.
He tried it by decimals and by compound interest. He tried it by square root and by cube root. He tried it by addition, simple and otherwise, and he tried it by mixed examples in vulgar fractions. But it was all of no use. Then he tried to do the sum by algebra, by simple and by quadratic equations, by trigonometry, by logarithms, and by conic sections. But it would not do.
Upon his lists, his red ink, and his ciphering, Augustus swooped like a bird of prey, and all his fond red-tape devices were shredded to the winds. Augustus set going new quadratic ones of his own, with an index and cross-references. It was then that Schmoll recovered his speech and walked alone, saying, "Mein Gott!"
"Yes, sir," said Owen, "I am tolerably well acquainted with quadratic equations; I have gone through the first six books of Euclid, and have begun trigonometry, but have not got very far. I am pretty well up in Latin.
There is a short memoir of Ferrari in Opera, tom. ix. Opera, tom. i. p. 66. Fra Luca's book, Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni é Proportionalita, extends as far as the solution of quadratic equations, of which only the positive roots were used. At this time letters were rarely used to express known quantities.
But every one who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind- sickening and complex rubbish about money and weights and measures, practice, interest, "rule of three," and all the rest of the solemn clap-trap invented by the masters of the old Academy for Young Gentlemen to fool the foolish predecessors of those who clamour for commercial education to-day, and by setting aside the pretence in teaching geometry, that algebraic formulae and the decimal notation are not yet invented, little boys of nine may be got to apply quadratic equations to problems, plot endless problems upon squared paper, and master and apply the geometry covered by the earlier books of Euclid with the utmost ease.
"A quarter's" mathematics, or "two quarters" political economy, moral philosophy, algebra, and quadratic equations, would seldom, I should think, enable the teacher and the scholar, by their joint efforts, to lay in such a stock of these sciences as would stand the wear and tear of half a score of children, and one help.
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