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"A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street."
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"First of all, you have to understand that I'm like anybody else. When I hear my voice on a record I absolutely loathe my voice. I cannot stand my voice."

"After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna."

"Although in Abbott and Costello, and straight man was first. That's a very interesting concept."
Explore more quotes by David Hilbert

"The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."

"He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks in the most part in vain."

"No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite."

"Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts."

"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."

"The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science."

"How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments."

"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself."

"Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper."
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