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William Allen Whitworth
(1 Feb 1840 - 12 Mar 1905)
English mathematician and clergyman who wrote several books on mathematics, of which the best known is Choice and Chance: Two Chapters of Arithmetic (1867). He was a priest in the Church of England.
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Science Quotes by William Allen Whitworth (1 quote)
Success in the solution of a problem generally depends in a great measure on the selection of the most appropriate method of approaching it; many properties of conic sections (for instance) being demonstrable by a few steps of pure geometry which would involve the most laborious operations with trilinear co-ordinates, while other properties are almost self-evident under the method of trilinear co-ordinates, which it would perhaps be actually impossible to prove by the old geometry.
— William Allen Whitworth
In Trilinear Coordinates and Other Methods of Modern Analytical Geometry of Two Dimensions (1866), 154.
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) -- 
