"All the modern higher mathematics is based on a calculus of operations, on laws of thought. All mathematics, from the first, was so in reality; but the evolvers of the modern higher calculus have known that it is so. Therefore elementary teachers who, at the present day, persist in thinking about algebra and arithmetic as dealing with laws of number, and about geometry as dealing with laws of surface and solid content, are doing the best that in them lies to put their pupils on the wrong track for reaching in the future any true understanding of the higher algebras. Algebras deal not with laws of number, but with such laws of the human thinking machinery as have been discovered in the course of investigations on numbers. Plane geometry deals with such laws of thought as were discovered by men intent on finding out how to measure surface; and solid geometry with such additional laws of thought as were discovered when men began to extend geometry into three dimensions."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Mary Everest Boole, Preface, Lectures on the Logic of Arithmetic (1903) p. 19.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_algebra
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
History of algebra
112 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by History of algebra →
Related Quotes
"The precision of statement and the facility of application which the rules of the calculus early afforded were in a m…"
"The most influential mathematics textbook of ancient times is easily named, for the Elements of Euclid has set the pa…"
"We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its pu…"
"As regards algebra, the early Arabs failed to adopt either the Diophantine or the Hindu notations. An examination of …"
"Admitting the Hindu and Alexandrian authors [such as Diophantus], to be nearly equally ancient, it must be conceded i…"
"al-Khwārizmī “not having taken algebra from the Greeks,. . . must have either invented it himself, or taken it from t…"
"My specific... object has been to contain, within the prescribed limits, the whole of the student's course, from the …"
"The following Treatise... has been endeavoured to make the theory of limits, or ultimate ratios... the sole foundatio…"
"Abel did not deny that we might solve quintics using techniques other than algebraic ones of adding, subtracting, mul…"
"I have decided first to consider the majority of the authors who up to now have written about [algebra], so that I ca…"