Hamilton College - Hamiltonian Yearbook (Clinton, NY)

Page 9 text:

HAMILTON COLLEGE 7 of Hamilton's mathematical department. Dr. Root is a study, not in co-ordinates, trilinear or otherwise, but in contradictions. In the same pair of shoes there walks a Dean Swift and a Charles Lamb. In allegory he would be pictured as the personilication of sweetness and light, crowned with a halo of tabasco sauce. And as the sons of Hamilton hold in loving re- membrance the figure of the allegory, so they have a lingering fondness for the aureole of hot stuff . There is many an alumnus of Hamilton, looking back through the vista of too many years, who remembers the math- ematical hurdles over which he would have come hard croppers had it not been for the lifts given to his un- mathematical mind by the same man who threw him, oratorically, out of the recitation room for snickering at the instructor's description of the progress of a geometri- cal line from the initial point A to the terminal point P. There are few men in whose natures there is so nicely balanced the power to boost', with the power to Hknockf' A decade and more ago a Hamilton Freshman, who had a prize speaker's aspirations and the ever-present memory of a delinquent mathematical examination, appeared on the chapel stage for the last time before the prize-speaking appointments for that year were announced. Dr. Root dropped in to listen to the speaking. When the show was over, he and the Freshman met just outside chapel, and the professor, smiling genially, said: Very handsome speaking, Mr. Blank. I congratulate you. But I have to remind you, sir, that a delinquent examination in mathematics stands between you and a prize speaking appointment. But have no uneasiness, Mr. Blank. I shall not seat you well forward among the cribbing delinquents. On the day of the examination you may sit where you choose, sir. And do you know

Page 8 text:

6 THE HAMILTCNIAN Qarm iiunt Yet what are all such gayeties to me Whose thoughts are full ofindices and surds? NIONCJ the men of science on two continents and wherever two or three are gathered to- gether in the name of Euclid or some other mathematical god, he is known as Oren Root, ' A.M., D.D., L.H.D., director of the Depart- ment of Mathematics at Hamilton College. To the sons of Hamilton the wide world over he is the only original, unextracted Square', Root. Dr. Root came by his monosyllabic nickname honestly. The brilliantly mathematical mind of one ofshis own students made the deduction, by a course of reasoning as clear as that bounded by the theorem and the Q. E. D. of a geometrical proposition, that, since Oren Root the First, was Cuben Root among his students, the extrac- tion of the Cube H Root ought to be the Square Root. Hence the name. And it is stated, on the authority of the Muse of Hamilton History, that the student who squared Dr. Root never was able to square himself. The ordinary, polite, bouquet-loaded biography will do very well for the ordinary, placid, easy-going man who fears to kick up a dust in going in and out among his fellows for fear of soiling his boots. But Square,' Root is not an ordinary man, and he isn't particularly placid or easy-going, and helll kick up as much dust as may be necessary to carry him to the end of the journey he has marked out. Therefore, from the film of bare biography can be developed no true likeness of the chief X2+7x+53 '

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8 THE HAMILTONIAN why? Sir, if you brought in the whole book, you would not know how to use it. That was very handsome speaking, Mr. Blank, very handsome speaking. And the tabasco sauce from the aureole dripped down over the Freshman as the figure of sweetness and light strode down through the campus and over the way through the gates of The Hemlocksf, Dr. Root was born on May 18, 1828, in Syracuse, N. Y. He couldn't help that. It was one of those natural accidents of birth. The same thing has happened to many Hamilton men. He entered Hamilton with the class of 1856, and was graduated No. 1 in his class. After studying at the Hamilton College law school under the late Theodore Dwight for one year, he moved to Milwaukee, Wis., became managing clerk in the oflice of Mariner 86 Pratt, and, in June, 1858, he was admitted to the Wisconsin bar in Milwaukee, and began practice in the oH'ice of Butler, Buttrick 85 Cottrell. But teaching must have been inbred in the man, for, after practising law for a year, he was appointed princi- pal of the high school at Monroe, Mich., in the autumn of 1859 and accepted the job. In the following year he was called to Hamilton College as an instructor in math- ematics, and two years later, he went to Rome, N. Y., to accept the principalship of the academy there. In 1866 he was called to the chair of English in the University of Missouri. He accepted the call, and to this day stories are told out there of the wonderful young orator who came out of the East to give to the young men of Missouri a notion of what oratory really was. For a time he was superintendent of schools at Car- rollton, Mo., and, from 1873 to 1876, he was president of Pritchett College, at Glasgow, Mo. In 1874. he was licensed to preach Presbyterian doctrine by the Presbytery