Academics From The United Kingdom

"A poem is not a statement, but a manifestation, a manifestation of being"

"Rocking on a lazy billow With roaming eyes, Cushioned on a dreamy pillow, Thou art now wise. Wake the power within thee slumbering, Trim the plot that's in thy keeping, Thou wilt bless the task when reaping Sweet labour's prize."

"Order is the law of all intelligible existence."

"Name the leaves on all the trees, Name the waves on all the seas, Name the notes of all the groves, Thus thou namest all my loves.I do love the young, the old, Maiden modest, virgin bold; Tiny beauties and the tall— Earth has room enough for all!Which is better—who can say?— Mary grave or Lucy gay? She who half her charms conceals, She who flashes while she feels?Why should I my love confine? Why should fair be mine or thine? If I praise a tulip, why Should I pass the primrose by?Paris was a pedant fool Meting beauty by the rule: Pallas? Juno? Venus?—he Should have chosen all the three!"

"Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, But God to man doth speak in solitude."

"If you’re doing something you love, an hour seems like 5 minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit 5 minutes can seem like an hour. And the reason that so many people are opting out of Education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion."

"Whoever thought of the No Child Left Behind legislation and its title certainly understands irony because millions of our children are indeed being left behind. This standardized testing is making the job of teachers unnecessarily difficult, limiting the discretion of teachers to teach. School systems are imposing conformity instead of promoting creativity."

"For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed."

"It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

"Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence."

"I saw a well-meaning policy statement that said ‘College begins in Kindergarten'. No it doesn’t, Kindergarten begins in Kindergarten. A friend of mine once said ‘A Three-Year old is not half a Six-Year old."

"We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirits and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies."

"By day the appalling loose beauty of prowling floes: lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks, and a thing like a blown rose."

"In the swirl of its pool the home-coming salmon has no intuition of anything changed."

"More than a third part of a century ago, in the library of an ancient town, a youth might have been seen tasting the sweets of knowledge to see how he liked them. He was of somewhat unprepossessing appearance, carrying on his brow the heavy scowl that the "mostly-fools" consider to mark a scoundrel. In his father's house were not many books, so it was like a journey into strange lands to go book-tasting. Some books were poison; theology and metaphysics in particular they were shut up with a bang. But scientific works were better; there was some sense in seeking the laws of God by observation and experiment, and by reasoning founded thereon. Some very big books bearing stupendous names, such as Newton, Laplace, and so on, attracted his attention. On examination, he concluded that he could understand them if he tried, though the limited capacity of his head made their study undesirable. But what was Quaternions? An extraordinary name! Three books; two very big volumes called Elements, and a smaller fat one called Lectures. What could quaternions be? He took those books home and tried to find out. He succeeded after some trouble, but found some of the properties of vectors professedly proved were wholly incomprehensible. How could the square of a vector be negative? And Hamilton was so positive about it. After the deepest research, the youth gave it up, and returned the books. He then died, and was never seen again. He had begun the study of Quaternions too soon."

"My own introduction to quaternionics took place in quite a different manner. Maxwell exhibited his main results in quaternionic form in his treatise. I went to Prof Tait's treatise to get information, and to learn how to work them. I had the same difficulties as the deceased youth, but by skipping them, was able to see that quaternionics could be employed consistently in vectorial work. But on proceeding to apply quaternionics to the development of electrical theory, I found it very inconvenient. Quaternionics was in its vectorial aspects antiphysical and unnatural, and did not harmonise with common scalar mathematics. So I dropped out the quaternion altogether, and kept to pure scalar and vectors, using a very simple vectorial algebra in my papers from 1883 onward. The paper at the beginning of vol. 2 of my Electrical Papers may be taken as a developed specimen; the earlier work is principally concerned with the vector differentiator ∇ and its applications, and physical interpretations of the various operations. Up to 1888 I imagined that I was the only one doing vectorial work on positive physical principles; but then I received a copy of Prof. Gibbs's Vector Analysis (unpublished, 1881-4)."

"Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively."

"Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion?"

"We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit."

"Waves from moving sources: Adagio. Andante. Allegro moderato."

"The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, “Do try to be like other people. Don’t frown.” And he tried and tried, but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions. Reader, if young, take warning by his sad life and death. For though it may be an honour to be different from other people, if Carlyle’s dictum about the 30 million be still true, yet other people do not like it. So, if you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do. In particular, if you are going to write a book, remember the wooden-headed. So be rigorous; that will cover a multitude of sins. And do not frown."

"General circuit theory, the theory of transmission lines and wave propagation, vector analysis, even the four famous Maxwell's equations—all had flowed from the pen of this amazing man."

"... the present time is the age of communication ... communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers. It received its first reasonably scientific treatment at the hands of Lord Kelvin, after the failure of the first transatlantic cable in the middle of the last century, and from the eighties on, it was perhaps Heaviside who did the most to bring into a modern shape."

"However absurd it may seem, I do in all seriousness hereby declare that I am animated mainly by philanthropic motives. I desire to do good to my fellow creatures, even to the Cui bonos."

"Poets know their own poems in a way and to a depth that is unique.. even if they mumble a bit ..their delivery will still have important things to tell us."

"Both the unlimited state and the unrestrained market have destroyed civil society, which is our world. … Civil society is something that is not the state or the market. Civil society is the world of you and I."

"Without civil intervention the free market tends to monopoly. What we should do is try to restore a truly free market, try to restore a market where there are no barriers to access and people have something other than their labour which they can trade or exchange."

"I believe in markets, but I don't believe in markets understood as private monopolies. I believe in open global, national and regional civic markets. If everybody owns and trades, and there wasn't just an exclusive, dispossessed class, there wouldn't be a radically insecure bottom twenty or thirty percent of society that causes problems for everybody else."

"What we are seeing is the rise of new oligarchies. It is almost as if the 19th century is returning to the 21st century where we are going to live in a world where most of us are disempowered, most of us permanently struggle, most of us can't make ends meet, all the while a very small elite at the top is reaping vast rewards."

"The welfare state disempowered working class people people by taking away their ability to self-organise, by taking away their ability to work with each other. It atomised working class communities and also prevented innovation and aspiration for those at the bottom."

"What is actually happening now is that monoploy capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people's institutions and lives. What we are actually developing in modern Europe is a post-democratic society. We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move into each other's regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those in the top. And there is clear economic and social evidence for this, it is very clear that only those at the very top of society in the developed world have really benefited from the last thirty years."

"The great error of the last 50 years is that conservatives think that they should unthinkingly endorse laissez -faire economics, but as presently conceived the free market destroys most of the things conservatives value; it destroys traditions, family life, societies, cultures, and established ways of doing things. The market place, as understood by contemporary neo-liberalism, is something no genuine conservative should support or endorse."

"George afterwards learned, to his great joy, that the same conception of the basis of Logic was held by Leibnitz, the contemporary of Newton. De Morgan, of course, understood the formula in its true sense; he was Boole's collaborator all along. Herbert Spencer, Jowett, and understood, I feel sure; and a few others, but nearly all the logicians and mathematicians ignored the statement that the book was meant to throw light on the nature of the human mind; and treated the formula entirely as a wonderful new method of reducing to logical order masses of evidence about external fact."

"My husband told me that when he was a lad of seventeen a thought struck him suddenly, which became the foundation of all his future discoveries. It was a flash of psychological insight into the conditions under which a mind most readily accumulates knowledge."

"‘European science could never have reached its present height had it not been fertilised by successive wafts from the […] knowledge stored up in the East.’ ‘Think what must have been the effect of the intense Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan and George Boole on the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–1865.’ ‘I do as George Boole and De Morgan did: I bow my head inreverent thankfulness to that mysterious East, whence come to us wafts of some transcendent power the nature of which we ourselves can hardly state in words.’"

"George Boole took up Leibniz's idea, and wrote a book he called '. The laws he formulated are now called ... Boole seems to have had a grandiose vision about the applicability of his algebraic methods to practical problems—his book makes it clear that he hoped these laws would be used to settle practical questions. William Stanley Jevons heard of Boole's work, and undertook to build a machine to make calculations in Boolean algebra. He successfully designed and built... the Logical Piano... the first machine to do mechanical inference."

"Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him ; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to rest had no tendency to prove them. But he had been endeavouring to give a more active and positive help than this to the cause of what he deemed pure religion. That he was doing nothing in this way was a sore distress to him."

"We believe that to the great body of the reading public the name of George Boole first became known, if indeed it has yet become known, through the announcement of his death; the announcement being accompanied in a few of the papers by a brief sketch of his life and works. Boole's researches were not of a nature to be appreciated by the multitude, and he never condescended to those arts by which less gifted men have won for themselves while living a more splendid reputation. When a great politician dies, or any man who has filled a large space in the public mind, and made a noise in the world, the newspapers long ring with the event. But it is otherwise with the great thinker, the mathematician or the philosopher, who has laboured silently and in comparative seclusion, to extend the boundaries of human knowledge. When such a man is removed by death there are public journals, even among those professedly devoted to literature and science, which can dismiss the event with a few faint and cold remarks.* But time rectifies all that. It is found sooner or later that no reputation, however brilliant, is permanent or durable which does not rest on useful discoveries and real contributions to our knowledge."

"No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it gives the impression of also being beautiful."

"Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect."

"I presume that few who have paid any attention to the history of the Mathematical Analysis, will doubt that it has been developed in a certain order, or that that order has been, to a great extent, necessary -- being determined, either by steps of logical deduction, or by the successive introduction of new ideas and conceptions, when the time for their evolution had arrived."

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."

"It has been said, that the principle involved in the above and in similar applications is that of the equal distribution of our knowledge, or rather of our ignorance the assigning to different states of things of which we know nothing, and upon the very ground that we know nothing, equal degrees of probability. I apprehend, however, that this is an arbitrary method of procedure. Instances may occur, and one such has been adduced, in which different hypotheses lead to the same final conclusion."

"The principles of the theory of probabilities [cannot] serve to guide us in the election of... [scientific] hypotheses."

"Dr. George Boole, author of The Laws of Thought had introduced himself in the year 1842 to Mr. De Morgan by a letter on the Differential and Integral Calculus then recently published. His character and pursuits were in many points like those of the author who found great pleasure in his correspondence and friendship. ...In 1847, his attention having been drawn to the subject by the publication of Mr. De Morgan's Formal Logic, he published the Mathematical Analysis of Logic and in the following year communicated... a paper on the Calculus of Logic. His great work, An Investigation into the Laws of Thought... was a development of the principle laid down in the Calculus..."

"A studious person may neglect his business for the sake of books; but if he does this, it is not his books that are to blame, but his want of principle of firmness."

"I have endeavoured, in the following treatise, to convey as complete an account of the present state of knowledge on the subject of Differential Equations, as was consistent with the idea of a work intended, primarily, for elementary instruction. It was my object, first of all, to meet the wants of those who had no previous acquaintance with the subject, but I also desired not quite to disappoint others who might seek for more advanced information. These distinct, but not inconsistent - aims determined the plan of composition."

"It is not possible, I think, to rise from the perusal of the arguments of Clark and Spinoza without a deep conviction of the futility of all endeavors to establish, entirely à priori, the existence of an Infinite Being, His attributes, and His relation to the universe. The fundamental principle of all such speculations, viz. that whatever we can clearly conceive, must exist, fails to accomplish its end, even when its truth is admitted. For how shall the finite comprehend the infinite? Yet must the possibility of such conception be granted, and in something more than the sense of a mere withdrawal of the limits of phænomal existence, before any solid ground can be established for the knowledge, à priori, of things infinite and eternal."

"Let x represent an act of the mind by which we fix our regard upon that portion of time for which the proposition X is true ; and let this meaning be understood when it is asserted that x denote the time for which the proposition X is true. (. . .) We shall term x the representative symbol of the proposition X."

"To infer the existence of an intelligent cause from the teeming evidences of surrounding design, to rise to the conception of a moral Governor of the world, from the study of the constitution and the moral provisions of our own nature; - these, though but the feeble steps of an understanding limited in its faculties and its materials of knowledge, are of more avail than the ambitious attempt to arrive at a certainty unattainable on the ground of natural religion. And as these were the most ancient, so are they still the most solid foundations, Revelation being set apart, of the belief that the course of this world is not abandoned to chance and inexorable fate."