[1203]. Mathematics is the science of definiteness, the necessary vocabulary of those who know.—White, W. F.
A Scrap-book of Elementary Mathematics (Chicago, 1908), p. 7.
[1204]. Mathematics, too, is a language, and as concerns its structure and content it is the most perfect language which exists, superior to any vernacular; indeed, since it is understood by every people, mathematics may be called the language of languages. Through it, as it were, nature herself speaks; through it the Creator of the world has spoken, and through it the Preserver of the world continues to speak.—Dillmann, C.
Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 5.
[1205]. Would it sound too presumptuous to speak of perception as a quintessence of sensation, language (that is, communicable thought) of perception, mathematics of language? We should then have four terms differentiating from inorganic matter and from each other the Vegetable, Animal, Rational, and Super-sensual modes of existence.—Sylvester, J. J.
Presidential Address, British Association; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2, p. 652.
[1206]. Little could Plato have imagined, when, indulging his instinctive love of the true and beautiful for their own sakes, he entered upon these refined speculations and revelled in a world of his own creation, that he was writing the grammar of the language in which it would be demonstrated in after ages that the pages of the universe are written.—Sylvester, J. J.
A Probationary Lecture on Geometry; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2, p. 7.
[1207]. It is the symbolic language of mathematics only which has yet proved sufficiently accurate and comprehensive to demand familiarity with this conception of an inverse process.—Venn, John.