Famous quotes by Mathematicians

"If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that, but imperfectly"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences"

E. T. Bell, Mathematician

"I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford"

G. H. Hardy, Mathematician

"I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction"

G. H. Hardy, Mathematician

"Thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Science is facts"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Need we add that mathematicians themselves are not infallible?"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Mathematical discoveries, small or great, are never born of spontaneous generation"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word, it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"In the old days, when people invented a new function, they had something useful in mind"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"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"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by the laws"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"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"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Geometry is not true, it is advantageous"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Facts do not speak"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

"Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the Earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence"

Henri Poincare, Mathematician

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