The country of Newton is still pre-eminent for its culture of mathematical physics, that of Gauss for the most abstract work in mathematics.—Merz, J. T.
History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh and London, 1903), p. 630.
[828]. As there is no study which may be so advantageously entered upon with a less stock of preparatory knowledge than mathematics, so there is none in which a greater number of uneducated men have raised themselves, by their own exertions, to distinction and eminence.... Many of the intellectual defects which, in such cases, are commonly placed to the account of mathematical studies, ought to be ascribed to the want of a liberal education in early youth.—Stewart, Dugald.
Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Part 3, chap. 1, sect. 3.
[829]. I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize. It is the constant aim of the mathematician to reduce all his expressions to their lowest terms, to retrench every superfluous word and phrase, and to condense the Maximum of meaning into the Minimum of language. He has to turn his eye ever inwards, to see everything in its dryest light, to train and inure himself to a habit of internal and impersonal reflection and elaboration of abstract thought, which makes it most difficult for him to touch or enlarge upon any of those themes which appeal to the emotional nature of his fellow-men. When called upon to speak in public he feels as a man might do who has passed all his life in peering through a microscope, and is suddenly called upon to take charge of a astronomical observatory. He has to get out of himself, as it were, and change the habitual focus of his vision.—Sylvester, J. J.
Baltimore Address; Mathematical Papers, Vol. 3, pp. 72-73.
[830]. An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.—Barrow, Isaac.
Mathematical Lectures (London, 1734), p. 32.