"The so-called Pythagoreans applied themselves to mathematics, and were the first to develop this science; and through studying it they came to believe that its principles are the principles of everything." (Aristotle, "Metaphysics", cca. 335-323 BC)
"So highly did the ancients esteem the power of figures and numbers, that Democritus ascribed to the figures of atoms the first principles of the variety of things; and Pythagoras asserted that the nature of things consisted of numbers." (Francis Bacon," " (Sir Francis Bacon, "De Augmentis" ["The Advancement of Learning"], 1605)
"Aristotle [...] imputed this symphony of the heavens [...] this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. [...] But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony [...] If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars." (John Milton, "Second Prolusion" ["De Sphaerarum Concentu"], cca. 1620)
"I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magick of numbers." (Thomas Browne, "Religio Medici", 1642)
"It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo; but Hipparchus [...] who among other achievements discovered the precession of the eqinoxes, ranks with the Newtons and the Keplers; and Copernicus, the modern father of our celestial science, avows himself, in his famous work, as only the champion of Pythagoras, whose system he enforces and illustrates. Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things, which captivate as much by their novelty as their truth, may find their precursors in ancient sages, and after a careful analysis of the blended elements of imagination and induction which charaterise the new theories, they will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Lothair", 1879)
"The union of philosophical and mathematical productivity, which besides in Plato we find only in Pythagoras, Descartes and Leibnitz, has always yielded the choicest fruits to mathematics; To the first we owe scientific mathematics in general, Plato discovered the analytic method, by means of which mathematics was elevated above the view-point of the elements, Descartes created the analytical geometry, our own illustrious countryman discovered the infinitesimal calculus - and just these are the four greatest steps in the development of mathematics." (Hermann Hankel, "Geschichte der Mathematik im Altertum und im Mittelalter", 1874)
"Among the memoirs of Kirchhoff are some of uncommon beauty. […] Can anything be beautiful, where the author has no time for the slightest external embellishment?—But—; it is this very simplicity, the indispensableness of each word, each letter, each little dash, that among all artists raises the mathematician nearest to the World-creator; it establishes a sublimity which is equalled in no other art, something like it exists at most in symphonic music. The Pythagoreans recognized already the similarity between the most subjective and the most objective of the arts." (Ludwig Bolzmann", "Ceremonial Speech", 1887)
"Pythagoras says that number is the origin of all things, and certainly the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe. But the law of number possesses an immanent order, which is at first sight mystifying, but on a more intimate acquaintance we easily understand it to be intrinsically necessary; and this law of number explains the wondrous consistency of the laws of nature. (Paul Carus, "Reflections on Magic Squares", Monist Vol. 16, 1906)
"Nobody before the Pythagoreans had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe." (Arthur Koestler, "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", 1959)
No comments:
Post a Comment