UNKNOWN QUANTITY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Unknown quantity

"Unknown quantity" Quotes from Famous Books

... been ordered in the jovial saint's honour, but nobody could tell how many candles it ought to hold since no one knew how many years he numbered. But Dorene solved the difficulty by saying, "Let X equal the unknown quantity, and just make a big X across the cake with ...

— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... conclusion, however, was that the affair was, simply, X-traordinary and in-X-plicable. Even the town mathematician confessed that he could make nothing of so dark a problem. X, every. body knew, was an unknown quantity; but in this case (as he properly observed), there was an ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... downward, and, though Hawthorne never fell into this error, he approaches closely to it in "Fanshawe." There is some dark secret between the two villains of the piece, which he leaves to the reader as an exercise for the imagination. This is a characteristic of all his longer stories. There is an unknown quantity, an insoluble point, in them, ...

— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... he really hoped that if any sort of trouble did come it would come along while he and Andy were holding the post of guards. He had a little fear that Spider Sexton might not be depended on, no matter what his good intentions, while Tom Betts was an unknown quantity. ...

— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren

... appeared in 1557, and it is in this work that the modern sign of equality first appears in print. The word "Cosike" is an adjective that was used for a long time in Germany as equivalent to algebraic, being derived from the Italian cosa, which stood for the unknown quantity. ...

— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

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