(source)
|
John Dee
(13 Jul 1527 - Dec 1608)
English mathematician, alchemist and astrologer.
|
Science Quotes by John Dee (3 quotes)
A marveilous newtrality have these things mathematicall, and also a strange participation between things supernaturall, immortall, intellectuall, simple and indivisible, and things naturall, mortall, sensible, componded and divisible.
— John Dee
In Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570).
O comfortable allurement, O ravishing perswasion, to deal with a Science, whose subject is so Auncient, so pure, so excellent, so surmounting all creatures... By Numbers propertie ... we may... arise, clime, ascend, and mount up (with Speculative winges) in spirit, to behold in the Glas of creation, the Forme of Formes, the Exemplar Number of all things Numerable... Who can remaine, therefore, unpersuaded, to love, allow, and honor the excellent sciehce of Arithmatike?
— John Dee
'Mathematicall Preface', in H. Billingsley, trans. The Elements of Geometry of the most Aunceint Philosopher Euclide of Megara (1570), in J. L. Hellbron, Weighing Imponderables and Other Quantitative Science around 1800 (1993), 2.
Theorem I. The first and most simple manifestation and representation of things, non-existent as well as latent in the folds of Nature, happened by means of straight line and circle.
Theorem II. Yet the circle cannot be artificially produced without the straight line, or the straight line without the point. Hence, things first began to be by way of a point, and a monad. And things related to the periphery (however big they may be) can in no way exist without the aid of the central point.
Theorem II. Yet the circle cannot be artificially produced without the straight line, or the straight line without the point. Hence, things first began to be by way of a point, and a monad. And things related to the periphery (however big they may be) can in no way exist without the aid of the central point.
— John Dee
From Monas Hierogyphica: Ioannia Dee, Londinensis (The Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee, of London) translated by C. H.Josten, in Ambix, vol. 12 (1964). As quoted and cited in Philip Davis with Reuben Hersh, in The Mathematical Experience (1981), 103.
See also:
- 13 Jul - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Dee's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
