Being encouraged by... success, beyond expectation; I afterwards ventured on many others and scarce missed of any, that I undertook, for many years, … - John Wallis
" "Being encouraged by... success, beyond expectation; I afterwards ventured on many others and scarce missed of any, that I undertook, for many years, during our civil Wars, and afterwards. But of late years, the French Methods of Cipher are grown so intricate beyond what it was wont to be, that I have failed of many; tho' I have master'd divers of them. Of such deciphered Letters, there be copies of divers remaining in the Archives of the Bodleyan Library in Oxford; and many more in my own Custody, and with the Secretaries of State.
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About John Wallis
John Wallis (November 23, 1616 – October 28, 1703) was an English clergyman and mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. He was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics.
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Dr. John Wallis
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Additional quotes by John Wallis
I... began... with simple series... of quantities in arithmetic proportion, or... their squares, cubes, etc. and then... their square roots, cube roots, etc. and powers composed of these... square roots of cubes etc. or... whatever... composites, whether the power was rational or... irrational. ...Whence a general theorem emerged... Proposition 64. But also... the quadrature... of the simple parabola... of all higher parabolas, and their complements, which no-one before... achieved. I... had enlarged geometry; for... there may now be taught by a single proposition the quadrature or all higher of infinitely many kinds... by one general method. ...I felt it would be welcome ...to the mathematical world ...also I saw ...the same doctrine widened ...I have related everything, whether conoids or pyramids, either erect or inclined, to cylinders and prisms. ...I saw ...as a direct consequence an almost completed teaching of spirals; and indeed I have taught the comparison with a circle... But also that teaching... was capable of extension...
[W]hereas Nature, in propriety of Speech, doth not admit more than Three (Local) Dimensions, (Length, Breadth and Thickness, in Lines, Surfaces and Solids;) it may justly seem improper to talk of a Solid (of three Dimensions) drawn into a Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, or further Dimension.
A Line drawn into a Line, shall make a Plane or Surface; this drawn into a Line, shall make a Solid. But if this Solid be drawn into a Line, or this Plane into a Plane, what shall it make? A Plano-plane? This is a Monster in Nature, and less possible than a Chimera or a Centaure. For Length, Breadth and Thickness, take up the whole of Space. Nor can our Fansie imagine how there should be a Fourth Local Dimension beyond these Three.
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