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If This Won't Get You Thinking, Nothing Will

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Frank Sonnenberg

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“O lass such a fine show as I saw on Wednesday last. I went to the camp at Duddingston and saw the Prince review his men. He was sitting in his tent when I first came to the field. The ladies made a circle round the tent and after we had gazed our fill at him he came out of the tent with a grace and majesty that is inexpressible. He saluted all the circle with an air of grandeur and affability capable of charming the most obstinate Whig.”

Charles Edward StuartDuddingston
Book:A Jacobite Miscellany: Eight Original Papers on the Rising of 1745 - 1746
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“In the meantime, his majesty, who has lived in dignified retirement since he came to the throne, has taken up his abode, with rural felicity, in a cottage in Windsor Forest; where he now, contemning all the pomp and follies of his youth, and this metropolis, passes his days amidst his cabbages, like Dioclesian, with innocence and tranquility, far from the intrigues of courtiers, and insensible to the murmering waves of the fluctuating populace...”

WindsorGeorge Iv
Book:The Ayrshire Legatees, The Steam-Boat, The Gathering of the West
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“A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.”

InspirationalScienceEducationWonderDesignMathematicsMath
Book:Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free
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“Whilst this change and enlargement of my mind was going on, his majesty King George IV, that gorgeous dowager, departed this life; an event of a serious kind to me, and to those with whom I had acted; for although our grief on the occasion was not of a very acute or lachrymose description, it was nevertheless heartfelt; for he stood in our opinion as the last of the regal kings, that old renowned race, who ruled with a will of their own, and were surrounded with worshippers. 'Never more,' said I, 'shall we have a monarch that will think his own will equivalent to law. His successors hereafter will only endeavour to think agreeably to their subjects; but the race of independent kings is gone forever.' In a word, the tidings of his death, though for some time expected, really smote me as a sudden and extraordinary event. Had I heard that the lions had become extinct on the face of the earth, I could not have been more filled, for a season, with wonder and a kind of sorrow.”

George Iv
Book:The Member: An Autobiography
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