"From the mathematical point of view there are infinitely many... numbers... Thus the first task of "scientific" arithmetic—as contrasted with... "practical" knowledge...— consists in finding such arrangements and orders of the assemblages of monads as will completely comprehend their variety under well-defined properties, so that their unlimited multiplicity may at last be brought within bounds (cf. Nichomachus I, 2). ...When we recall how Plato (Theaetetus 147 C ff.) makes Theaetetus, speaking from a very advanced stage of scientific geometry and arithmetic, describe his procedure... What... appears to Plato so exemplary for Socrates' present inquiry concerning "knowledge", and indeed for every Socratic inquiry of this kind[?]. Theaetetus... divides "the whole realm of number"... into two domains: to one of these belong all those numbers which may arise from a number when it is multiplied by itself... to the other, all those which may arise from the multiplication of one number with another. The first number domain he calls "square," the second "promecic" or "heteromecic" (oblong), designations which recur in all later arithmetical presentations (cf. Diogenes Laertius III, 24). Thus two eide [kinds, forms, or species]... allow us to articulate and delimit a realm of numbers previously incomprehensible because unlimited, especially if we substitute the various eide of polygonal numbers for the one eidos of oblong numbers."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-1936)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Infinity
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Infinity
139 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Infinity →
Related Quotes
"Should not a true understanding of life promote care for the future along with the present? This is the immediate dut…"
"In Sorbière's day, European thinkers and intellectuals of widely divergent religious and political affiliations campa…"
"On the one side were ranged the forces of hierarchy and order—Jesuits, Hobbesians, French Royal Courtiers, and High C…"
"All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite."
"Empedocles holds that the corporeal elements are four, while all the elements-including those which initiate movement…"
"Motion is supposed to belong to the class of things which are continuous; and the infinite presents itself first in t…"
"The science of nature is concerned with spatial magnitudes and motion and time, and each of these at least is necessa…"
"Some, as the Pythagoreans and Plato, make the infinite a principle in the sense of a self-subsistent substance, and n…"
"The Pythagoreans identify the infinite with the even. For this, they say, when it is cut off and shut in by the odd, …"
"Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worke…"