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Quotes by Mathematician
"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues."
42
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
41
"The rule which should guide us in such cases is simple and obvious enough: that the aggregate testimony of our neighbours is subject to the same conditions as the testimony of any one of them."
41
"To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances."
41
"The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes."
41
"We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori."
41
"There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable."
Will,
41
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
40
"To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years."
40
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
40
"The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic."
40
"As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity."
40
"The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs."
40
"It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few."
40
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
40
"Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes."
40
"No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe."
40
"Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power."
40
"It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient."
40
"When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that."
40
"In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals."
40
"I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days."
40
"The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions."
39
"At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups."
39
"Facetiousness is allowable when it is the most proper instrument of exposing things apparently base and vile to due contempt."
39
"The early study of Euclid made me a hater of geometry."
39
"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it."
39
"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
39
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers."
39
"The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme."
39
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible."
39
"We have the duty of formulating, of summarizing, and of communicating our conclusions, in intelligible form, in recognition of the right of other free minds to utilize them in making their own decisions."
39
"A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed."
38
"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts."
38
"Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race."
38
"We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra."
38
"If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment."
38
"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."
38
"My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher."
38
"For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal."
38
"Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it."
Sun,
38
"Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall."
38
"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
38
"Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself."
38
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