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Men of Mathematics QUOTES

Men of Mathematics QUOTES

1 " Commenting on the return of Descartes’ remains to his native France, Jacobi remarks that “It is often more convenient to possess the ashes of great men than to possess the men themselves during their lifetime. "

― , Men of Mathematics

2 " The mathematical exposition is extremely concise and occasionally awkward. Laplace was interested in results, not in how he got them. To avoid condensing a complicated mathematical argument to a brief, intelligible form he frequently omits everything but the conclusion, with the optimistic remark “Il est aisé à voir” (It is easy to see). He himself would often be unable to restore the reasoning by which he had “seen” these easy things without hours—sometimes days—of hard labor. "

― , Men of Mathematics

3 " Asked some years later how he (Abel) had managed to forge ahead so rapidly to the front rank he replied, “By studying the masters, not their pupils”- a prescription some popular writers of textbooks might do well to mention in their prefaces as an antidote to the poisonous mediocrity of their uninspired pedagogics. "

― , Men of Mathematics

4 " As Whitehead has observed, “No Roman lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram. "

― , Men of Mathematics

5 " EULER CALCULATED WITHOUT APPARENT EFFORT, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind” (as Arago said), is not an exaggeration of the unequalled mathematical facility of Leonard Euler (1707-1783) "

― , Men of Mathematics

6 " He (Gauss) lives everywhere in mathematics "

― , Men of Mathematics

7 " In 1835 the Academy of Sciences began publishing its weekly bulletin (the Comptes rendus). Here was a virgin dumping ground for Cauchy, and he began swamping the new publication with notes and lengthy memoirs- sometimes more than one a week. Dismayed at the rapidly mounting bill for printing, the Academy passed a rule, in force today, prohibiting the publication of an article over four pages long. This cramped Cauchy’s luxuriant style, and his longer memoirs, including a great one of 300 pages on the theory of numbers, were published elsewhere. "

― , Men of Mathematics

8 " Today it is given in the textbooks as an example which young students dispose of in twenty minutes or less. Yet it held Newton up for twenty years. He finally solved it, of course "

― , Men of Mathematics

9 " Replying two weeks later he states his opinion of Fermat’s Last Theorem. “I am very much obliged for your news concerning the Paris prize. But I confess that Fermat’s Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. "

― , Men of Mathematics

10 " [As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]'s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn. "

― , Men of Mathematics

11 " Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré had, and none in his superior in the gift of clear exposition. "

― , Men of Mathematics

12 " Although he was a limited mathematician with no pretensions to scientific greatness, Crelle was a broadminded man, in fact a great man. "

― , Men of Mathematics

13 " Strange as it may seem, not all of the great mathematicians have been professors in colleges or universities. Quite a few were soldiers by profession; others went into mathematics from theology, the law, and medicine, and one of the greatest was as crooked a diplomat as ever lied for the good of his country. A few have had no profession at all. Stranger yet, not all professors of mathematics have been mathematicians. But this should not surprise us when we think of the gulf between the average professor of poetry drawing a comfortable salary and the poet starving to death in his garret. "

― , Men of Mathematics

14 " A new concept may be “in the air” for generations until some one man—occasionally two or three together—sees clearly the essential detail that his predecessors missed, and the new thing comes into being. Relativity, for example, is sometimes said to have been the great invention reserved by time for the genius of Minkowski. The fact is, however, that Minkowski did not create the theory of relativity and that Einstein did. It seems rather meaningless to say that So-and-so might have done this or that if circumstances had been other than they were. Any one of us no doubt could jump over the moon if we and the physical universe were different from what we and it are, but the truth is that we do not make the jump. "

― , Men of Mathematics

15 " A rational mind is sometimes the queerest
mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth. "

― , Men of Mathematics

16 " Clarity is, indeed, all the more necessary when one essays to lead the reader farther from the beaten path and into wilder territory- Joseph Liouville "

― , Men of Mathematics

17 " Projective geometry has opened up for us with the greatest facility new territories in our science, and has rightly been called a royal road to its own particular field of knowledge. —FELIX KLEIN "

― , Men of Mathematics

18 " Lagrange’s father, once Treasurer of War for Sardinia, married Marie-Thérèse Gros, the only daughter of a wealthy physician of Cambiano, by whom he had eleven children. Of this numerous brood only the youngest, Joseph-Louis, born on January 25, 1736, survived beyond infancy. "

― , Men of Mathematics

19 " The predatory barons, kings, and princelings of the Middle Ages had bred a swarm of rulers with the political ethics of highway robbers and, for the most part, the intellects of stable boys. "

― , Men of Mathematics