Henry Burchard Fine

Henry Burchard Fine (September 14, 1858 – December 22, 1928) was an American mathematician and dean at Princeton University.

Quotes

 * The opinion is widely prevalent that even if the subjects are totally forgotten, a valuable mental discipline is acquired by the efforts made to master them. While the Conference admits that, considered in itself this discipline has a certain value, it feels that such a discipline is greatly inferior to that which may be gained by a different class of exercises, and bears the same relation to a really improving discipline that lifting exercises in an ill-ventilated room bear to games in the open air. The movements of a race horse afford a better model of improving exercise than those of the ox in a tread-mill.
 * Simon Newcomb, Henry Burchard Fine, Florian Cajori et al. Report of the Committee [of Ten on Secondary School Studies Appointed at the Meeting of the National Educational Association July 9, 1892: With the Reports of the Conferences Arranged by this Committee and Held December 28-30, 1892]. p. 108: On math education

The Number-System of Algebra, (1890)
Henry Burchard Fine. Number-system of Algebra, (Boston and New York, 1890),


 * Number is that property of a group of distinct things which remains unchanged during any change to which the group may be subjected which does not destroy the distinctness of the individual things.
 * p. 3; Reported in Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914), p. 263


 * Judged by the only standards which are admissible in a pure doctrine of numbers i is imaginary in the same sense as the negative, the fraction, and the irrational, but in no other sense; all are alike mere symbols devised for the sake of representing the results of operations even when these results are not numbers (positive integers).
 * p. 86; Reported in Moritz (1914, 282)