6 Quotes & Sayings By James Joseph Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester was born in Pennsylvania, in 1841. He received his education in the public schools of his native state, and in 1858 he entered the University of Michigan. His teacher at the university was Professor G. W Read more

Cooke, who had been a classmate of John Locke at Oxford. The student's interest in natural sciences resulted in the writing of an original essay on "The Life-History of the Fly." This essay, which attracted considerable attention to his work, won him a baccalaureate degree. Sylvester then taught school for one year in Pennsylvania, and entered the medical school of the University of Michigan, where he graduated with honors in 1862.

He at once started practice at Ann Arbor, Michigan; but within two years he became convinced that his vocation lay not in medicine but rather in philosophy and psychology. Sylvester at once entered into partnership with John W. Cook, whom he had met while attending medical school; and began to study these new fields under their instruction.

His studies were interrupted by the Civil War; but when peace was restored he resumed them with more than usual ardor. During eighteen months of service on hospital staffs he had opportunity to study anatomy and physiology, pathology and therapeutics; while his contact with men whose lives were being saved or lost by his ministrations made him more than ordinarily sensitive to life's problems. At the close of the war Sylvester began to study medicine again; but on examination he was given a certificate declaring that "he was not fitted for practice." At this juncture Dr.

Cook died, and Sylvester became sole proprietor of the Ann Arbor Medical Society library, which was then valued at $1,000. He thus found himself possessed of a handsome fortune which he wisely invested largely in real estate. In 1878 Sylvester married Miss Ellen Sargent Clark, a niece of Horace Greeley; and after their marriage they went abroad where they remained two years studying languages and art history under private tutors.

They visited Paris for three months during which time their hostess introduced them to society life and extended to them all courtesies due to distinguished strangers from royalty to tradesmen. In 1880 they returned home where Mr. Sylvester became professor of philosophy in Northwestern University until 1883 when he resigned because conditions required him to devote himself entirely to private practice as a physician and surgeon.

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Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation. James Joseph Sylvester
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Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to possessions, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as the space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence. James Joseph Sylvester
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Mathematics is the music of reason. James Joseph Sylvester
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May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life. James Joseph Sylvester
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The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence. James Joseph Sylvester