"You can see without admonition, what effect this false ground of yours will produce in the whole structure of your Arithmetica Infinitorum; and how it makes all that you have said unto the end of your thirty-eighth proposition, undemonstrated, and much of it false. The thirty-ninth is this other lemma: "In a series of quantities beginning with a point or cypher and proceeding according to the series of the cubic numbers as 0.1.8.27.64, &c. to find the proportion of the sum of the cubes to the sum of the greatest cube, so many times taken as there be terms." And you conclude that "they have a proportion of 1 to 4;" which is false. ... And yet there is grounded upon it all that which you have of comparing parabolas and paraboloeides with the parallelograms wherein they are accommodated. ... Besides, any man may perceive that without these two lemmas (which are mingled with all your compounded series with their excesses) there is nothing demonstrated to the end of your book: which to prosecute particularly, were but a vain expense of time. Truly, were it not that I must defend my reputation, I should not have showed the world how little there is of sound doctrine in any of your books. For when I think how dejected you will be for the future, and how the grief of so much time irrecoverably lost, together with the conscience of taking so great a stipend, for mis-teaching the young men of the University, and the consideration of how much your friends will be ashamed of you, will accompany you for the rest of your life, I have more compassion for you than you have deserved. Your treatise of the Angle of Contact, I have before confuted in a very few leaves. And for that of your Conic Sections, it is so covered over with the scab of symbols, that I had not the patience to examine whether it be well or ill demonstrated."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Linguists from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandCryptographersLogicians from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Thomas Hobbes, "Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics, One of Geometry, the other of Astronomy, in the Chairs set up by the Noble and Learned Sir Henry Savil, in the University of Oxford" (1656) in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol.7 (1845) ed. Sir William Molesworth, Bart.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Wallis
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Wallis
John Wallis (November 23, 1616 – October 28, 1703) was an English clergyman and mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. He was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathema
88 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Wallis →
Related Quotes
"[Mathematics were] scarce looked upon as Academical studies but rather Mechanical... And among more than two hundred …"
"Mathematicks were not, at the time, looked upon as Accademical Learning, but the business of Traders, Merchants, Seam…"
"However, it is not unlikely that the Arabs, who received from the Indians the numeral figures (which the Greeks knew …"
"‘Yet some few of such investigations we have in the five first propositions of Euclid’s thirteenth book … seems to be…"
"Perhaps it would have been more prudent, if I were only writing to seek fame, to have presented some few particular p…"
"You may find this work (if I judge rightly) quite new. For I see no reason why I should not proclaim it; nor do I bel…"
"This method of mine takes its beginnings where Cavalieri ends his Method of indivisibles. ...for as his was the Geome…"
"I came across the mathematical writings of Torricelli... which... I read in... 1651... where... he expounds the geome…"
"I imagined... it was possible... to establish by what means the circle could be squared, or... that it could... not, …"
"In Hilary Term 1636, 7. I took the Degree of Batchelor of Arts; and in 1640, the Degree of Master of Arts, and then l…"