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Equation   /ɪkwˈeɪʒən/   Listen
Equation

noun
1.
A mathematical statement that two expressions are equal.
2.
A state of being essentially equal or equivalent; equally balanced.  Synonyms: equality, equivalence, par.
3.
The act of regarding as equal.  Synonym: equating.



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"Equation" Quotes from Famous Books



... not identical, really, though the superficial observer might be misled to think so. And yet, in a higher sense, perhaps, it may almost be said, with careful limitations, that, considering certain delicate nuances of filtered thought, as it were, and making meticulous allowance for the personal equation—" ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... the people's depreciation of their own creative efforts. As people become inured to machine standards, they lose their sense of art values along with their joy in creative effort, their self regard as working men and their personal equation in industrial life. ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... involution of spirit into matter and of the evolution of matter into spirit. If, on the one hand, we insist too strongly on one view, we shall only have a one-sided conception of the process; if, on the other, we neglect one factor, we shall never solve the at present unknown quantity of the equation. Thus the Soul is represented as the "lost sheep" struggling in the meshes of the net of matter, passing from body to body, and the Spirit is represented as descending, transforming itself through the spheres, ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... father; in short, the supernatural is as much a part of these plays as salt is part of the ocean. If from any masterpiece we could abstract everything not strictly rational—every element of wonder, mystery, and enchantment—it would be like taking all of the unknown quantities out of an equation: there would be nothing left to solve. The mind of genius is a wireless station attuned to the vibrations from the daemonic sphere; the works of genius fascinate and delight us largely for this reason: we, too, respond ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... question sharply argued was: whether England should retain Guadaloupe or Canada. She had conquered both, but it seemed to be admitted that she must restore one. It was even then a comical bit of political mathematics to establish anything like an equation between the two, nor could it possibly have been done with reference to intrinsic values. It was all very well to dilate upon the sugar crop of the island, its trade, its fertility, its harborage. Every one knew that Canada could outweigh all these things fifty times over. But ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... definition? It is only expressing the meaning of one word by the use of another word as nearly as possible synonymous. Now, in the case of a child, it is at least an even chance that that other word is just as unknown as the one it is intended to explain. It is like, in algebra, solving an equation with two unknown quantities, by giving the value of one unknown quantity in terms of the other. A child, for instance, is told that "potent" means "efficacious," that "power" means "ability," that "potion" means a "physical draught," that "potential" means "existing in possibility, not in act." These ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... we can not predicate of any physical agent that it is abstractedly the cause of another" (p. 15). "Causation is the will," "creation is the act, of God" Grove on "Correlation of Physical Forces," (p. 199). "Between gravity and motion it is impossible to establish the equation required for a rightly-conceived causal relation" ("Correlation and Conservation of Force," p. 253). See also Herschel's ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... procured pure. These crystals also dissolve in nitric acid, and then form after a few moments crystals of the nitrate of the hyduret of cinnamyle. The conversion of styrone into the hyduret of cinnamyle by the action of the platinum black is shown by the following equation: ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... with the fingers of his left hand playing hide and seek among his bright elf locks, while his right danced over a slate, making algebra signs with marvelous rapidity, jumped up three feet in the air, letting his slate fall with a tremendous crash, and destroying many a beautiful equation. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... of the Catholic Church, an Armenian or a Protestant, you have almost always said enough to define his political position. Without the need of additional information you have already got the elements of his civic equation, and can say whether he is a loyal subject of the Porte, or whether he looks to Russia or Greece, to France, Austria, or England as the sovereign of his future choice. In fact, as has been often pointed out, in the East at this day ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... discrimination, as we do with regard to our contemporaries. We may even set them down to ignorance rather than specialization of interest. These differences depend on the attitude of mind of the physician, and are largely the result of his own personal equation. They do not reflect in any way either on his judgment or on the special knowledge of his time, but are the index of his ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... to riches has been so rapid that it's more like a dream than a reality. And here's the worst feature of the whole business," continued Welborn as the two made their way to the ticket wagon. "Here's the fly in the ointment. My side of the equation has been nothing but plus, plus. I am fearful that yours will be more than minus. You are tired of the mob; you want to get away from the crowds. You have a mental picture of the ranching business; horses, cattle, cowboys, knee-deep grass billowing through the great open spaces. It's your ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... development, handled the theme on distinctively religious lines, preserving the Mystery element in its three-fold development, and equating the Vessel of the Mystic Feast with the Christian Eucharist. From what we now know of the material it seems certain that the equation was already established, and that Borron was simply stating in terms of romance what was already known to him in terms of Mystery. In face of the evidence above set forth there can no longer be any doubt that the Mystic Feast of the Nature cults really ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... is dosed with too much religion. Life is to be learned from life, and the professional moralist is at best but a manufacturer of shoddy wares. At the ultimate remove, God or the life force, if anything, is an equation, and at its nearest expression for man—the contract social—it is that also. Its method of expression appears to be that of generating the individual, in all his glittering variety and scope, and through him progressing to the mass with its problems. In the end a balance is invariably struck ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... is simply an addition of x—x to the equation. If by next November we can get a single cotton-port open, we shall have settled that Uncle Tom and the Duchess of Sutherland may return to the social cabinet of Great Britain,—and that being so, the political cabinet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... In an atomic explosion the identity of the atoms, not simply their arrangement, is changed. A considerable fraction of the mass of the explosive charge, which may be uranium 235 or plutonium, is transformed into energy. Einstein's equation, E mc^2, shows that matter that is transformed into energy may yield a total energy equivalent to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The significance of the equation is easily seen when one recalls that the velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second. The energy released ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States

... or galloped through. Another man takes no note of any of these things; always follows somebody else's lead when he can, and gets lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl in daylight. Just so some men have an eye for an equation, and would read at sight the one that you puzzled over. It is told of Sir Isaac Newton that he required no demonstration of the propositions in Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as he had read the enunciation the solution or answer was plain at once. The power may be cultivated, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... did not disguise the expression of annoyance which, at my appearance, clouded her countenance with the thought that I was aware how ill-timed was my presence. My master, doubtless absorbed in an equation, had not yet raised his head; I therefore waved my right hand towards the young lady, like a fish moving his fin, and on tiptoe I retired with a mysterious smile which might be translated "I will not be the one to prevent him committing ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... been taken from the equation—had he not felt the thrill of it in his fingers and looked upon the warm fires of it as it lay unbound on Pierre Breault's table, his present relation with Bram Johnson he would have considered as a purely physical condition, and he might then have accepted the ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood

... both of those up to him, and they seemed to embarrass him a little. I gathered that he had suggested them both to Mrs. Carstairs, and that she had turned them down hard. The ground seemed delicate. You see, we must allow for the personal equation in all this. No matter where they met, he couldn't hang around the house getting acquainted with Mary without coming into sort of intimate contact with Mrs. Carstairs, and giving a kind of domestic touch to their ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... complications. The discussions always reveal the dominion of the prepossessions in the minds of the disputants which are in the mores. We know that an observer of nature always has to know his own personal equation. The mores are a societal equation. When the mores are the thing studied in one's own society, there is an operation like begging the question. Moreover, the convictions which are in the mores are "faiths." They are not affected ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... of that," said Madame de Villefort; "but I have a passion for the occult sciences, which speak to the imagination like poetry, and are reducible to figures, like an algebraic equation; but go on, I beg of you; what you say interests me to the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... him from one performance to another. Leaving out of the equation such mild incidents as the friendship for George Sand, which began with a brave avowal of platonics, and speedily drifted into something more complex; also the equally interesting incident of his being invited to visit the Chateau of the lovely Adele Laprunarede, and the Alpine ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... twenty-fifth of a second on a clear day, around noon, even in the dead of winter, in any part of Alaska that the writer has travelled in. There are those who write that they can always hold a camera still enough to get a sharp negative at even one tenth of a second. Probably the personal equation counts largely in such a matter, and a man of very decided phlegmatic temperament may have advantage over his more sanguine and nervous brother. The thing may be done; the writer has done it himself; ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... are Curtal-Sonnets, that is they are constructed in proportions resembling those of the sonnet proper, namely 6 4 instead of 8 6, with however a halfline tailpiece (so that the equation is rather 12/8 9/2 ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... own strong personal liking. His profound knowledge of human nature in all its forms, not excepting the clerical, professional, and theological sort,—especially when in the fighting mood,—enabled him to measure accurately the personal equation in every problem, even when masked to the point of self-deception. His judicial balance and his power to see the real point in a controversy made him an admirable guide, philosopher, and friend. His vital rather than traditional view and use of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... twelve weeks of argument. These were only rumors, after all, for the rotunda never knows positively what goes on in high circles; but the rotunda does figuring, too, when at length the problem is reduced to a simple equation, with Bijah Bixby as x. If it were true that Bijah had gone over to Jethro Bass, the Consolidation ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... their secret meaning, peculiarly interesting. A note of Peirce's, for example, in the number for February, proposes two new symbols, one for the mystic ratio of the circumference to the diameter, a second for the base of Napier's logarithms,—and then, by joining them in an equation with the imaginary symbol, expresses in a single sentence the mutual relation of the three great talismans in the magic of modern science. Another article, in the April number, by Chauncey Wright, contains a new view of the law of Phyllotaxis, approaching it from an a priori stand-point, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... claimed for the quantification of the predicate is that it reduces every affirmative proposition to an exact equation between its subject and predicate. As a consequence every proposition would admit of simple conversion, that is to say, of having the subject and predicate transposed without any further change in the proposition. The forms also of Reduction (a term which will ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... men, battalions, or divisions, conquer—that is, kill or take captive—all the others, while themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and on the other fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to the fifteen, and therefore 4x 15y. Consequently x/y 15/4. This equation does not give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us a ratio between two unknowns. And by bringing variously selected historic units (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, a series of numbers could ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... when advancing or declining to advance the partner's bid, the personal equation should be a most important, if not the deciding, factor. Some players are noted for their reckless declaring; with such a partner the bidding must be ultra-conservative. Other players do not regard conventional rules in their early declarations. The bids ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work

... be," smiled Sara; "it's a question in which you must consider the personal equation. I am rather finicky about men who exude what seems to pass for love. They don't make good husbands. The best husband is the one who wins you, not takes you. For heaven's sake, Anne, when you marry, let your romance be clean, wholesome, natural; not ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... swings this way and that, and neither scale will definitely settle down. It is very likely that the bias of temperament makes us incapable of decision. What is called the personal equation holds the two scales of our minds painfully equal, and while we meditate perpetual peace we suddenly hear the trumpet blowing. In many of us a primitive instinct survives which blinds and warps the reason, and calls us like a bugle to the silly and atrocious field. For the immediate ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... physical type involves a really bad man, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man is really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only one half of the equation. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... tendency to become changed into acts; their motor effects are indirect, and at a long range. But this intermediate moment is par excellence the moment for psychology. It is also the moment of the personal equation: every man receives, transforms, and restores outwards according to his own organization, temperament, idiosyncrasies, character—in a word, according to his personality, of which needs, tendencies, desires, are the direct and immediate expression. So we come back, by another route, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... evidently, a perfect labyrinth of complexity. But it was the labyrinth for which the earlier economist held, so he thought, the thread. No matter how dark the passage, he still clung tight to it. And his thread was his "fundamental equation of value" whereby each thing and everything is sold (or tends to be sold) under free competition for exactly its cost of production. There it was; as simple as A. B. C.; making the cost of everything proportional to ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... short discussion (No. 18, p. 4) of the psychological aspects of monotonous diet and the nutritional effects of internment is worth careful attention. "A diet that would be tolerated if the subject were at liberty may become intolerable under conditions of imprisonment. There is a large personal equation operative in this direction. The soldier imbued with a high sense of his value to his country and of the justice of his cause will endure a monotonous diet that would not be endurable in the prisoner overwhelmed with disappointment and crushed with sorrow." ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton

... until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo; while he lost his arithmetic in trying to figure out the equation between the discoveries and the economies of force. The economies, like the discoveries, were absolute, supersensual, occult; incapable of expression in horse-power. What mathematical equivalent could he suggest as the value of a Branly coherer? ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... read by the uninstructed eye? A single line may contain the elements of the motions of all the heavenly bodies; and the eye of science, taking its stand-point at the center of gravity of the system, will see in the equation the harmonious revolutions of all the bodies which circle the heavens. It is such labors and such generalizations that have rendered his name illustrious in the history of mathematical science. Is it of no practical value that the ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett

... difficult part is what Barbicane has done; that is, to get an equation which shall satisfy all the conditions of the problem. The remainder is only a question of arithmetic, requiring merely the knowledge of the ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... of facts which belongs to the historian, whose task it is to interpret as well as to transcribe, Mr. Motley showed, of course, the political and religious school in which he had been brought up. Every man has a right to his "personal equation" of prejudice, and Mr. Motley, whose ardent temperament gave life to his writings, betrayed his sympathies in the disputes of which he told the story, in a way to insure sharp criticism from those of a different ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... don't go into a spell. The war is going to help you out on these lonesome fits, mother. Like Slawson put it to-day in Integral Calculus Four, war reduces the personal equation to its lowest terms—it's ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... founder of observational astronomy. He measured the obliquity of the ecliptic, and agreed with Eratosthenes. He altered the length of the tropical year from 365 days, 6 hours to 365 days, 5 hours, 53 minutes—still four minutes too much. He measured the equation of time and the irregular motion of the sun; and allowed for this in his calculations by supposing that the centre, about which the sun moves uniformly, is situated a little distance from the fixed earth. He called this point the excentric. ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... two things, only one statement is made, such as y 2, it is satisfied by a whole row of points, all the points in a horizontal line 2 feet above the ground. Hence y 2 may be said to represent that straight line, and is called the equation to that straight line. Similarly x 6 represents a vertical straight line 6 feet (or inches or some other unit) from the left-hand edge. If it is asserted that x 6 and y 2, only one point can be found to satisfy both ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... were susceptible of exact quantitative measurement, we might translate them by a curve which, after a first gradual ascent, runs upward with extreme rapidity and then falls almost vertically. The equation of this curve might be called the equation of the variations of collective sentiments subjected to a ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... reference to disputes of that sort, are of opinion that human duties may be ascertained with the exactness of mathematics. They deal with morals as with mathematics; and they think what is right may be distinguished from what is wrong with the precision of an algebraic equation. They have, therefore, none too much charity toward others who differ from them. They are apt, too, to think that nothing is good but what is perfect, and that there are no compromises or modifications to be made in consideration of difference ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... all the bugbears of a furlough, she said, speaking at meetings was the chief. If only the hard deputy work at home could be eliminated from the missionaries' programme, they would have a happier and a better time. But here the personal equation obscured her judgment. For to abandon the system would be to do away with the intimate touch and association by which interest in the Mission Field is so largely maintained. To many missionaries, also, the duty of telling to the congregations up and down the country the story of their work is ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... was a place I came to when I had a problem to thrash out. That morning I had been trying to work out an equation to give the coefficient of discharge for the matter in combustion. You may call it gas, if you wish, for we treated it like gas at the center for convenience—as it came from the ...
— Houlihan's Equation • Walt Sheldon

... very well to laugh; but some of us, our personal equation quite apart, could not help feeling that the joke was of a precarious quality, that the situation held tragic possibilities. A young and attractive girl, by no means constitutionally insusceptible, and imbued with heterodox ideas of marriage—alone ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... upwards of forty upon the same face. These three copies would not be recognized as referring to the same original. That of Mr. Pinart seems to show the most careful study and is probably accurate. Good photographs would be of service in eliminating the inconvenient personal equation always present in the delineation of such subjects. These figures bear little resemblance to those painted upon the vases ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... six o'clock, and, little by little, the question presents itself to his mind with the strictness of an equation, bare and dry and cleared of all the details that complicate ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc

... data on the fly, slowing down now and then to read something, until a yell from Santos or Koa warned that the sun line was creeping close. When he had all data noted on the board, he started his mathematics. He was right in the middle of a laborious equation when he stumbled over a thorium crystal. He went headlong, shooting like a rocket three feet above the ground. His board flew away at a tangent. His stylus sped out of his glove like a miniature projectile, and the slide rule ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... the observer focuses it on the metal or slag and moves an adjustable dial or gage so as to get an exact comparison between the color of the heat measured with the calor of a lamp or screen in the pyrometer itself. This, of course, requires practice, and judgment, and brings in the personal equation. With care, however, very reliable temperature measurements may be made. The temperatures of rails, as they leave the finishing pass of a rolling mill, are measured ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin

... common ignorance, or to moral and theological tradition, all the interests and activities of man, other than those which are physical or physiological. And some of them are even aware, that if they could find the physical equation of man, or, through their knowledge of physiology, actually produce in man the sensations, thoughts, and notions now ascribed to the intelligent life within him, the question of the spiritual or material nature of man and the world, would remain precisely where it was. The explanation ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... form a liquid mixture, or be dissolved in some selected solvent; but in each case we may state the following considerations regarding the course of the reaction. For a transformation to take place from left to right in the sense of the reaction equation, all the molecules A1, A2, ... must clearly collide at one point; otherwise no reaction is possible, since we shall not consider side-reactions. Such a collision need not of course bring about that transposition of the atoms of the single molecules which constitutes the above reaction. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... crude!" remarked St Aubyn, patting his shoulder as they walked. "There's more in religion than that, a great deal. Beware of generalising too widely, and don't forget the personal equation. Now, come and have a look at the orchids. I've got one or two rather fine ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... adventure articulate! Therefore I treasure the curious story the tramp told me. I do not question its truth. It came as all truth does, through a clouded and unclean medium: and any judgment of the story itself must be based upon a knowledge of the personal equation of the ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... in Mr. Dorsett. "Quite right too. But here I produce the personal equation. For five weary weeks I've skittered about this city, carrying around with me half a dozen of the ripest, richest franchise propositions ever matured. Bona-fide prospects, mind you, communities just yearning for transportation ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... a dangerous equation in the school system. I mean by inefficiency, the quality of being temperamentally unsuited to the profession. There are a large number of anemic, hysterical young women teaching in the public schools of our cities who should not be there. They should not be there in justice ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... crux of creation; and he finds the X, which is the hypothetical base of algebraical science—the unknown quantity of which sex is the symbol. Reasoning from effect back to cause and from cause forward to effect the mystic finds the equation complete, perfect, and likewise simple; but it is simple only after we have deciphered it. Like the prize puzzles which are designed to exercise the inductive faculties, mysticism, when we have not the key, is a most tantalizing enigma. Most "practical" persons dismiss it with the same superficial ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... each function, social or personal, that is engaged in the performance of useful service, and this due is measured by the amount necessary to stimulate and maintain the efficient exercise of that useful function. This equation between function and sustenance is the true meaning of ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... structures to fit them for giving perfection to the senses of smell, sight, and hearing, so necessary to animals of prey. In short, the shape and structure of the teeth regulate the forms of the condyle, of the shoulder-blade, and of the claws, in the same manner as the equation of a curve regulates all its other properties; and as in regard to any particular curve all its properties may be ascertained by assuming each separate property as the foundation of a particular equation, in the same manner a claw, a shoulder-blade, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... in equilibrium. If the condition is not fulfilled to start with, Hardy showed that a position of equilibrium becomes established after a single generation, and that this position is thereafter maintained. The proportions of the three classes which satisfy the equation q^2 pr are exceedingly numerous, and populations in which they existed in the proportions shown in the appended table would remain in stable ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett

... unnarrated but existent by implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms (e.g. My Favourite Hero or Procrastination is the Thief of Time) composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of financial, social, personal and sexual success, whether specially collected and selected as model pedagogic themes (of cent per cent merit) for the use of preparatory and junior grade students or contributed in printed ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... repetition of its development by any embryo thus becomes only the repetition of a lesson learned by rote; and, as I have elsewhere said, our view of life is simplified by finding that it is no longer an equation of, say, a hundred unknown quantities, but of ninety-nine only, inasmuch as two of the unknown quantities prove to be substantially identical. In this case the inheritance of acquired characteristics cannot ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... himself, with the only sort of love he had ever felt, to the supremacy of his difficult [90] thoughts.—A kind of empty place! Here, you felt, all had been mentally put to rights by the working-out of a long equation, which had zero is equal to zero for its result. Here one did, and perhaps felt, nothing; one only thought. Of living creatures only birds came there freely, the sea-birds especially, to attract and detain which there were all sorts of ingenious contrivances ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... solution of acetic acid, together with various other ingredients which have come from the materials furnishing the acid. In the manufacture of vinegar, alcohol is always used as the source of the acetic acid. The production of acetic acid from alcohol is a simple oxidation. The equation C2H6O O2 C2H4O2 H2O shows the chemical change that occurs. This oxidation can be brought about by purely chemical means. While alcohol will not readily unite with oxygen under common conditions, if the alcohol ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn

... to quote ironically Hegel's famous equation of the real with the rational to his english disciple, who ends his ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... was an equation to be produced between fifteen original eggs on one side, and seven whole eggs, seven live chickens, two dead chickens, and another egg on the other. My theory was, that two of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... could list all the traits, each representing some one characteristic of human nature, and measure the amount of each of them possessed by a man, we could represent his nature—read his character—in a great equation. John Smith would equal so many units of this, plus so many units of that, and so on. Such a mental inventory would express his individuality conceivably in its entirety and with great exactitude. No such list has been made for any man, much less have the exact amounts ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... Redeemer, it seemed, had no less than four kinds of righteousness, three to keep, which he could not do without, and one kind to give away. Every detail of the case was supported by a little cluster of marginal texts, and no doubt it appeared as logical and simple to the author as a problem or an equation. But what an extraordinary form of religion it all was! There was not the least misgiving in the mind of the author. The Bible was to him a perfectly unquestioned manifesto of the mind of God, and solved everything and anything. And yet the whole basis of the pilgrimage was insecure. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The earth now rests upon the sun,—in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... should have been encouraging. But somehow it was not. What was possible to Thorndyke was, theoretically, possible to me—or to anyone else. But the possibility did not realize itself in practice. There was the personal equation. Thorndyke's brain was not an ordinary brain. Facts of which his mind instantly perceived the relation remained to other people unconnected and without meaning. His powers of observation and rapid inference were almost incredible, as I had noticed again and ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... the most important made in astronomy for many centuries, are far less valuable than those for which his observations furnished the material. He discovered the third and fourth inequalities of the moon in longitude, called respectively the variation and the annual equation, also the variability of the motion of the moon's nodes and the inclination of its orbit to the ecliptic. He obtained an improved value of the constant of precession, and did good service by rejecting the ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant

... the world of sensible matter, so that whatever energy is dissipated in the one is by the same act accumulated in the other. It is like the negative plate in photography, where light answers to shadow and shadow to light. Or, still better, it is like the case of an equation in which whatever quantity you take from one side is added to the other with a contrary sign, while the relation of equality remains undisturbed. Thus, it will be noticed, from the ingenious and subtle, but quite defensible suggestion ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... Mr. Grimm. He stood silent a moment, staring at the president. Some subtle change crept into the listless eyes, and his lips were set. "Perhaps I had better explain here that the personal equation enters largely into an affair of this kind," he said at last, slowly. "It happens that it entered into this. Unless I am ordered to pursue the matter further I think it would be best for all concerned ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... substance. Exactly this situation repeats itself with the spade of the farmer. The conditions are somewhat different, but the principle must be the same. Of course the farmer may use spades of different sizes, but he is far from bringing the product of spade surface and weight to a definite equation. Sometimes he wastes his energies and sometimes he exhausts them. But it is not only a question of the size of shovel or spade. The whole position of the body, the position of the hands, the direction ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... for him what the amount of his daily wages came to in a week, first by simple arithmetic, secondly by fractions, thirdly by decimals, and fourthly by duodecimals; and then to prove the whole correct by an algebraical equation. But all these triumphs of learning were not destined for me. I found, at length, that the glass coach drove up the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... the efficiency of the organisation of the General hospitals, either at the advanced or actual base, I have already testified. Naturally the working of these hospitals varied with the personal equation of the officer in charge of them, but as a whole the service has every reason to be proud of their success. As far as surgical results are concerned, and with these I had special acquaintance, the success of the hospitals was ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... an observation on the mental plane this personal equation would not appreciably affect the impressions received, for since each would thoroughly grasp the entire subject it would be impossible for him to see its parts out of due proportion; but, except in the case of carefully trained ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... he said, "are the color of friendship." "Abbott, you say the dearest things—but let's get back to our equation. I don't mean that Mrs. Gregory got jealous of Grace Noir—I don't know how to explain—you can't handle cobwebs without marring them." She paused. The gossamer shades of sensibility which she would have defined, threatened to become coarsened by the mere specific gravity of words—such words ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... easier forms of equation, have been set him by a stranger. With some coaching he was also able to master textual problems in this way, giving eager and glad response in the form of "yes" and "no" when it came to questioning him as to his having understood or not ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... youth is not sufficient. They must be shown why it is to their best interest to live the clean life. In every department of education we are beginning to appreciate that to achieve results it must be based upon the individual equation. This is why we have found it necessary to assert that it is the duty of parents to make sex hygiene a personal matter and to acquaint their children with the facts relating to this problem. It has been discovered, however, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... ready to draw in my horns if they didn't seem to accept me straight at what I judged my own value. For a long while now it has been my endeavor to sink what was once described to me as my pers'nal equation. I don't think of myself at all, if I can help it; and the consequence is the shyness gets pushed into the background, my manner becomes more free and open, and people begin to treat me in a more ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... death on the northern side. Their occurrence or non-occurrence is a thing impossible to prophesy or calculate. They open without warning immediately ahead of the traveler, following no apparent rule or law of action. They are the unknown quantity of the polar equation. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... stood as still as marble, except to moisten his lips which were becoming very dry. He had been willing enough to accept Brent's plan of refuge, before a blood equation developed, but now things were different. His honour, as a man of the mountains knows and sustains his honour, would permit him ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... limitation, through all this wide range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the originality of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... looked at me inquiringly, but I hesitated. It was not on account of monetary causes, but for peculiarly private reasons—the dilemma of one of our house becoming a spy. The Captain, unaware of the personal equation that was obsessing me before giving my word, evidently thought that his financial inducements were not ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... sceptical, but the deep mind is reverential and faithful. The problems of doubt torture the soul, and call for solution. Infinite and finite stand in strange relations in the mind of man; with his finite powers he would grasp the infinite of God. He fails to find the equation of his terms, and, baffled in his search, in the insanity of intellectual pride, denies his Maker. He puts the infinite mysteries of revelation into the narrow crucible of the finite, the residuum is—nothing; he calls ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... solar feast is doubtful, though Professor Rh[^y]s and others insist that Lug is a sun-god. The name of the Welsh Lleu, "light," is equated with Lug, and the same meaning assigned to the latter.[322] This equation has been contested and is doubtful, Lugus probably meaning "hero."[323] Still the sun-like traits ascribed to Lug before Mag-tured suggest that he was a sun-god, and solar gods elsewhere, e.g. the Polynesian Maui, are culture-gods ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... physical life. Historians have written that Greece was invaded by Aryans about 1400 B.C., and that henceforth arose the wonderful civilization; but the student knows that such was an impossibility and that some vital factor has been left out of the equation. When the Aryans invaded Greece they were savages from Neolithic Europe and could not possibly have possessed the high artistic capacities and rich culture necessary for the unfolding of AEgean civilization. "Of thorns men do not gather figs, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... note down those six points and add that X is probably an expert cyclist and a fairly good shot with a rifle, you may possibly be able, presently, to complete the equation, X ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... misapplying it. To study it, the student should ask himself what each word of the statement means, and whether all are necessary. Can the word "independent" be omitted? If not, why not? What does this word really mean in this connection? Must each equation contain all the unknown quantities? May some of these equations contain none of the unknown quantities? What would be the condition of things if there were fewer equations than unknown quantities? What if there were more ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain

... his hat drawn over his eyes, hunched defiantly in the corner. As Anthony stopped beside him he stared up with a scowl, evidently intended to be intimidating; he must have adopted it as a defense against this entire gigantic equation. At Anthony's sharp "That seat taken?" he very slowly lifted the feet as though they were a breakable package, and placed them with some care upon the floor. His eyes remained on Anthony, who meanwhile sat down and unbuttoned the uniform coat issued him at Camp ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... starry dome alone sat Margaret again, this time with no friendly water-tank for her defense, and took counsel with herself. The howling coyotes seemed to be silenced for the time; at least they had become a minor quantity in her equation of troubles. She felt now that man was her greatest menace, and to get away safely from him back to that friendly water-tank and the dear old railroad track she would have pledged her next year's salary. She stole softly to the place where she had ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... and more equable spirit of "the best for all the people." The men and women of the State were taking time to analyze some of those high-sounding phrases with which so-called temperance had disguised vicious theories which left human nature out of the equation. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... was ever perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, or that it ever will be so. Explosion and convulsion are necessary to the maintenance of either hypothesis: for La Place has demonstrated, that the precession of the equinoxes is only a secular equation of a very long period, which, of course, proves nothing either on one side ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... secular variations of the eccentricities and inclinations of the planetary orbits depend upon the solution of an algebraic equation equal in degree to the number of planets whose mutual action is considered, and the coefficients of which involve the values of the masses of those bodies. It may be shown that if the roots of this equation be equal or imaginary, the corresponding ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago

... probably most English-speaking lawyers would accept the preventive theory without hesitation. As to the violation of equal rights which is charged, it may be replied that the dogma of equality makes an equation between individuals only, not between an individual and the community. No society has ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence. If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... not taught her to watch a man's moods and tenses; when to speak and when to be silent, and how to avoid useless discussion of subjects on which there is a pronounced difference of opinion. Leaving out the personal equation, the older and more experienced woman is better fitted to get along peaceably with a man than the young girl who has her wisdom yet ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... United States has consisted chiefly of manufacturing and selling. The raw material has occupied no consistent place in the equation. The value it has had in fixing the price of the finished product has been merely in its relation to transportation. Intrinsically it has been accorded no value. This situation continued just as long as there was practically ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen

... denies that there is a personal Devil, must be prepared also to deny that there is a personal Christ. So far as the argument for personal existence is concerned, Christ and good angels stand on one side of the equation, and the Devil and his angels on the other; and whoever would rub out the one, must rub out the ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith

... was not mathematically accurate, as the condition of track, the weather, and the personal equation of the locomotive engineers all had an effect, but, later, when correcting the rating by tests with dynamometers, it was found that ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Beverly S. Randolph



Words linked to "Equation" :   egality, tie, mathematics, egalite, simultaneous equations, math, equalization, equate, mathematical statement, status, maths, quadratic, regression of y on x, position, leveling, biquadratic, equalisation



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