Occupation: Mathematician Birth: February 7, 1883 Death: December 21, 1960
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes..
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes..
The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting im….
In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nin….
Pick the assumptions to pieces till the stuff they are made of is exposed to plain view - this is the cardinal rule for understanding the basis of ou….
The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity..
Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us..
Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source o….
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth..
If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which w….
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along wit….
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future....
Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the pre….
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions..
Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of ph….
Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for ordinary mortals to attemp….
A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, nu….
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences..
Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics..
Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn..
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 whi….