Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

SECOND CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF FOUR SPACE 43
the town? He must be far off.’ And as to three
different places to which he had been he asked me to tell
him about them in one word. I did not know what he
meant, and then he asked me if one was in a line with
the other and all in a row, or if they were in a triangle.
“He enjoys cutting paper figures with a pair of scissors,
and without my ever having told him about triangles
remarked that a right-angled triangle which he had cut
out was half of an oblong. I exercise his body with care,
he can dig well in the earth with his little hands. The
blossom can fall and no fruit left. When he is fifteen
I want to send him to you to be your pupil.”
In Johann’s autobiography he says:—
“My father called my attention to the imperfections
and gaps in the theory of parallels. He told me he had
gained more satisfactory results than his predecessors,
but had obtained no perfect and satisfying conclusion.
None of his assumptions had the necessary degree of
geometrical certainty, although they sufficed to prove the
eleventh axiom and appeared acceptable on first sight.
“He begged of me, anxious not without a reason, to
hold myself aloof and to shun all investigation on this
subject, if I did not wish to live all my life in vain.”
Johann, in the failure of his father to obtain any
response from Gauss, in answer to a letter in which he
asked the great mathematician to make of his son “an
apostle of truth in a far land,” entered the Engineering
School at Vienna. He writes from Temesvar, where he
was appointed sub-lieutenant, 1823:—
“Temesvar, November 3rd, 1923.
“DEAR GOOD FATHER,
“I have so overwhelmingly much to write
about my discovery that I know no other way of checking
myself than taking a quarter of a sheet only to write on.
I want an answer to my four-sheet letter.