Cedarville College Memorabilia

MATHEMATICS . DORA A DER O . It i said Euclid always insisted that knowledge was worth acqumng for its own ake, and one day when a lad who had just begun geometry asked "What do I gain by learning all this stuff?", Euclid made his slave give the boy some cop– per , " ince," said he, "he must make a profit out .:>f what he learns." The same question has doubtless been asked many times since the days of Euclid, but it is not probable the same answe;- is always given. One cannot blame a student for desiring to make a practical use of his studies. The point is we differ on the meaning of practical utility. If you ask what you will gain from a particular study, do you mean how will it help you to earn your bread and butter, or how will it broaden your ideas of life, and help you understand some– thing of the thoughts of men of learning, in hort make life more worth the living? As uredly the latter. The student who aims to learn nothing excep t those facts which will help him earn a living is fitting himself for a life of intellectual poverty, when an inheritance which would make him a prince among men of letters is his if he will but take it. Ther_e is so much in mathematics which is useful for every-day life that we some– time forget that there is any other phase to it. We point out to the student th e beautiful figures of speach in choice literature, the wonderful sequence of events in history, but say nothing about the beauties of a mathematical demonstration when in reality it combines the beauties of all these. History has no such sequence of events as has a proposition in geometry, no such fine shades of meaning in classic or modern literature as are contained in a single equation in calculus. The stu– dent who sees in a proposition not only the proof of that problem, but the wonder– ful chain of logic connecting it with all that precedes, and who gets a working id ea of it for the problems to follow, will go into the world able to look at the event of the day with the eye of the historian. According to one's mood mathematic exalts o r humbles one. Sometimes we need to be taught that, wh;Je certain th.ings are within our power to do, others are as absolutely beyond our control as the sweeping course of the planets . You may push a stone over the cliff, thus far you are master; but from the moment you re– lease it you have no more control over its motion than the stone itself has. You may choose to let fall a perpendicular from a given point to a straight line, but from that moment you are as much a creature of circum tances as the stone, and can no more dictate where the perpendicular will strike the line than the stone can choose where it will fall. You are only a humble pectator waiting to see the re– . ult of laws over which the finite mind has no control. If one feel humbled or discouraged let him solve a difficult problem in geometry ur algebra, or let him, even though it be with considerable labor, work out the paths of the planet , then when he realizes that the Creator of tho e planets and of the law which coutrol them in their course, has given him the power to reason out the result of those laws in the sam way he reasons two tim s three are ix, then he will indeed realize that God has made "him only a little lower than the angel ." There i no study a, ide from the Bibi it elf which bring one so clo to the Creator as mathematic.. Here the finite com s n are t the Infinite by recognizing the . amc.. unerring Jaw;;. 11