Eric Temple Bell Quotes
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
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 prevailing famine of substance.
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...
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.
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
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 importance who has not also been an innovator.
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.
Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.
Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.
If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.
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.
If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.
Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit.
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
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 our beliefs.
Had Poincaré been as strong in practical science as he was in theoretical he might have made a fourth with the incomparable three, Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss.