
Presidential Years:Zail Singh's posthumous defence of his controversial tenure
David Van Praagh in: The Greater Game: India's Race with Destiny and China http://books.google.co.in/books?id=kCI4492cHTEC&pg=PA187, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2003, p. 187
Presidential Years:Zail Singh's posthumous defence of his controversial tenure
On her first meeting with Brian Jones. As quoted in Up and Down With The Rolling Stones, by Tony Sanchez.
Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 580
Context: Fermat knew that under reflection light takes the path requiring least time and, convinced that nature does indeed act simply and economically, affirmed in letters of 1657 and 1662 his Principle of Least Time, which states that light always takes the path requiring least time. He had doubted the correctness of the law of refraction of light but when he found in 1661 that he could deduce it from his Principle, he not only resolved his doubts about the law but felt all the more certain that his Principle was correct.... Huygens, who had at first objected to Fermat's Principle, showed that it does hold for the propagation of light in media with variable indices of refraction. Even Newton's first law of motion, which states that the straight line or shortest distance is the natural motion of a body, showed nature's desire to economize. These examples suggested that there might be a more general principle. The search for such a principle was undertaken by Maupertuis.
“A Man is to go about his own Business as if he had not a Friend in the World to help him in it.”
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections
Characters, ch. 9 (12); translation from R. C. Jebb and J. E. Sandys (trans.), The Characters of Theophrastus (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 75.