A General History of Mathematics from the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century. Tr. from the French of John [!] Bossut ... To which is Affixed a Chronological Table of the Most Eminent Mathematicians

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J. Johnson, 1803 - 540 pages
 

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Page 61 - ... any account of them in writing. For he considered all attention to Mechanics, and every art that ministers to common uses, as mean and sordid, and placed his whole delight in those intellectual speculations, which, without any relation to the necessities of life, have an intrinsic excellence arising from truth and demonstration only.
Page 61 - ... he did not think the inventing of them an object worthy of his serious studies, but only reckoned them among the amusements of geometry. Nor had he gone so far, but at the pressing instances of...
Page 163 - In the dial-plate there were twelve small windows, corresponding with the divisions of the hours. The hours were indicated by the opening of the windows, which let out little metallic balls, which struck the hour by falling upon a brazen bell.
Page 138 - AVhcu a summons is sent to me I will take this stone, and, placing myself in the sun, I will, though at a distance, melt all the writing of the summons.
Page 30 - ... to have led to the discoveries of other geometrical properties, as the conchoid of Nicomedes, the cissoid of Diocles, and the quadratrix of Dinostratus. This latter geometrician was the follower and friend of Plato, whose devotion to the science of geometry was such that he caused it to be inscribed over the door of his school, ' Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.
Page 61 - Yet Archimedes had such a depth of understanding, such a dignity of sentiment, and so copious a fund of mathematical knowledge, that, though in the invention of these machines he gained the reputation of a man endowed with divine rather than human knowledge, yet he did not vouchsafe to leave any account of them in writing.
Page 65 - The reason is, all bodies lose some of their weight in a fluid, and the weight which a body loses in a fluid, is to its whole weight, as the specific gravity of the fluid is to that of the body.
Page 95 - Sunt Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. Leo, Virgo, Libraque, Scorpius, Arcitenens, Caper, Amphora, Pisces.
Page 297 - This is the same as saying that when a ray of light passes out of one medium into another, the...
Page 248 - Huyghens demonstrated that the velocity of a body descending down any curve, is the same at every instant, in the direction of the tangent, as it would have...

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