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Quotes by Mathematician
"I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house."
10
"If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future."
10
"Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name."
10
"Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability."
10
"A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations."
Mind,
10
"If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing."
10
"It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious."
10
"The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?"
10
"It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient."
10
"My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology."
10
"To address questions of scientific responsibility does not necessarily imply that one needs technical competence in a particular field (e.g. biology) to evaluate certain technical matters."
10
"Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge."
10
"Even private persons in due season, with discretion and temper, may reprove others, whom they observe to commit sin, or follow bad courses, out of charitable design, and with hope to reclaim them."
10
"If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard."
10
"An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something."
10
"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."
10
"That justice should be administered between men, it is necessary that testimonies of fact be alleged; and that witnesses should apprehend themselves greatly obliged to discover the truth, according to their conscience, in dark and doubtful cases."
10
"I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect."
10
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful."
10
"In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America."
10
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
10
"The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law."
10
"The possessors of wealth can scarcely be indifferent to processes which, nearly or remotely have been the fertile source of their possessions."
9
"Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows."
9
"Whence it is somewhat strange that any men from so mean and silly a practice should expect commendation, or that any should afford regard thereto; the which it is so far from meriting, that indeed contempt and abhorrence are due to it."
9
"Wherefore for the public interest and benefit of human society it is requisite that the highest obligations possible should be laid upon the consciences of men."
9
"Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it."
9
"And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones."
9
"The Committee supports the idea that there should be, within the University of California, a campus which puts particular emphasis on the education of undergraduates within the framework of a College system."
9
"String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string."
9
"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."
9
"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."
9
"The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic."
9
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
9
"I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
9
"In turning from the smaller instruments in frequent use to the larger and more important machines, the economy arising from the increase of velocity becomes more striking."
9
"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude."
9
"Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries."
9
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."
9
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
9
"I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years."
9
"We are servants rather than masters in mathematics."
9
"As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable."
9
"There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another."
9
"The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market."
9
"When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again."
9
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