Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides

all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath, and off we go.

Before we begin, I'd like to give a special shout out to two new

Patreon subscribers, Lee Clark Zumpi and Brian Spalden.

Thank you so much for your support. It's much appreciated.

This evening we're reading the memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, written by himself

with his most interesting essays, letters, and miscellaneous writings, familiar, moral, political,

economical, and philosophical.

Selected with care from all his published productions, and comprising whatever

is most entertaining and valuable to the general reader in two volumes.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1839

by Harper and Brothers in the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New York.

Let's begin. On the usefulness of the mathematics.

Mathematics originally signified any kind of discipline or learning,

but now it is taken for that science which teaches or contemplates whatever is capable of being

numbered or measured. That part of the mathematics which relates to numbers only is called arithmetic and that which is concerned

about measure in general whether length, breadth, motion, force, etc. is called geometry. As to the usefulness of arithmetic, it is well

known that no business, commerce, trade, or employment whatsoever, even from the merchant to the shopkeeper, etc, can be managed and carried on without the assistance of numbers.

For by these, the trader computes the value of all sorts of goods that he dealeth in, does his business

with ease and certainty, and informs himself how matters stand at any time with respect to men, money, and merchandise, to profit and loss, whether he goes forward or backward, richer or poorer. Neither is this science only useful to the merchant,

but is reckoned the primamobile or first mover of all mundane affairs in general and is useful for all sorts and

...