“The very spirits of the winds, when they were sent to carry the grateful harvest to the thirsting fields of Calabria, did not forget the geometry which they had studied in the caverns of Æolus and of which the geologist is daily discovering the diagrams.”

— Benjamin Peirce

Ben Yamen's Song of Geometry (1853)

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Benjamin Peirce 24

American mathematician 1809–1880

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 2. The Age of Innocence

“Very late in life, when he was studying geometry, some one said to Lacydes, "Is it then a time for you to be learning now?"”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

"If it is not," he replied, "when will it be?"
Lacydes, 5.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 4: The Academy

“These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

“I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

“To give here an elaborate account of Pappus would be to create a false impression. His work is only the last convulsive effort of Greek geometry which was now nearly dead and was never effectually revived. It is not so with Ptolemy or Diophantus. The trigonometry of the former is the foundation of a new study which was handed on to other nations indeed but which has thenceforth a continuous history of progress. Diophantus also represents the outbreak of a movement which probably was not Greek in its origin, and which the Greek genius long resisted, but which was especially adapted to the tastes of the people who, after the extinction of Greek schools, received their heritage and kept their memory green. But no Indian or Arab ever studied Pappus or cared in the least for his style or his matter. When geometry came once more up to his level, the invention of analytical methods gave it a sudden push which sent it far beyond him and he was out of date at the very moment when he seemed to be taking a new lease of life.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

“When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 36

“So when ebbing Nile hides himself in his great caverns and holds in his mouth the liquid nurture of an eastern winter, the valleys smoke forsaken by the flood and gaping Egypt awaits the sounds of her watery father, until at their prayers he grants sustenance to the Pharian fields and brings on a great harvest year.”
Sic ubi se magnis refluus suppressit in antris Nilus et Eoae liquentia pabula brumae ore premit, fumant desertae gurgite valles et patris undosi sonitus expectat hiulca Aegyptos, donec Phariis alimenta rogatus donet agris magnumque inducat messibus annum.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book IV, Line 705

“I met with an accident about five weeks ago in London, which has prevented my walking ever since, and I think I broke one of the metatarsal bones; this has been a favourable circumstance, for it has increased my literary application in a considerable degree. I have been studying, not the theory of the winds, but of the air, and I have made observations on harmonics which I believe are new. Several circumstances unknown to the English mathematicians which I thought I had first discovered, I since find to have been discovered and demonstrated by the foreign mathematicians; in fact, Britain is very much behind its neighbours in many branches of the mathematics: were I to apply deeply to them, I would become a disciple of the French and German school; but the field is too wide and too barren for me.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Letter to Dr. Bostock (June, 1798) as quoted by George Peacock, Life of Thomas Young (1855)

“M. Desargues puts me under obligations on account of the pains that it has pleased him to have in me, in that he shows that he is sorry that I do not wish to study more in geometry, but I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions which serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature… You know that all my physics is nothing else than geometry.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Letter to Marin Mersenne (July 27, 1638) as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893) letter dated in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. 3, The Correspondence (1991) ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch

“I am busy painting every day studies of the weavers here, which I think are technically better than the painted studies from Drenthe, which I sent you.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1884
Source: Quote from Letter 355, from Nuenen The Netherlands, January 1884; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, page: Catalog: Dutch Period 2. - Weaver

“The very spirits of the winds, when they were sent to carry the grateful harvest to the thirsting fields of Calabria, did not forget the geometry which they had studied in the caverns of Æolus and of which the geologist is daily discovering the diagrams.”

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Benjamin Peirce 24

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