"Throughout the middle ages, under the influence of Aristotle, the science was entirely misconceived. Newton had the advantage of coming after a series of great men, notably Galileo... who in the previous two centuries had reconstructed the science and had invented the right way of thinking about it. He completed their work. Then, finally, having the ideas of force, mass, and distance clear and distinct in his mind, and realizing their importance and their relevance to the fall of an apple and the motions of the planets, he hit upon the law of gravitation and proved it to be the formula always satisfied in these various motions."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/An_Introduction_to_Mathematics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
An Introduction to Mathematics
An Introduction to Mathematics, by Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1911, was intended for a general lay audience. The book touches upon the nature, unity and internal structure of mathematics and its applications toward describing and understanding natural phenamena. It foreshadows some points of Whitehead's later work in philosophy and metaphysics.
79 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by An Introduction to Mathematics →
Related Quotes
""A show of violence,"...may surely be "offered" to the trivial results which occupy the pages of some elementary math…"
"[I]ts fundamental ideas are not explained to the student disentangled from the technical procedure which has been inv…"
"[I]t is... an error to confine attention to technical processes, excluding consideration of general ideas. Here lies …"
"The object of the following chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning... t…"
"Arithmetic... will be a good subject to consider in order to discover, if possible, the most obvious characteristic o…"
"[A]rithmetic... applies to everything... of all things it is true that two and two make four. Thus... mathematics... …"
"Swift, in his description of Gulliver's voyage to ... describes the mathematicians of that country as silly and usele…"
"The progress of science consists in observing... interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the ev…"
"To see what is general in what is particular and what is permanent in what is transitory is the aim of scientific tho…"
"The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. ...[L]ike the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great sci…"