Quote#Wisdom
Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A.…
Quote byCarl Barus · 1856–1935
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: "The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898), Footnote: Greenhill: Applications of Elliptic Functions, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc., 1895, 1896; Engineering, July, 1896..
English (original)
Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers... when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved.
— Carl Barus
More from Carl Barus
Looking over such famous old books as Montmort's 'Analyse des jeux de hasard' or Moivre's 'Doctrine of Chances' one regrets that so much excellent mathematics should have been wasted on games most of which are wholly obsolete. Coriolus in …
Memory peters out like the infinite series of a ζ-function.
Out of 1,000 men who are called, one (probably the ratio is much smaller) is chosen to do glorious scientific work.
Gentlemen, I am one of the 999 about to be forgotten.
In even greater measure is this true of the top. The top has been everybody's toy and must, therefore, at one time or another have piqued everybody's curiosity. Lagrange, Poinsot, Jacobi, not to mention other great names, have in turn paid …
Mathematicians will do well to observe that