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Historian Of Mathematics Inspirational Quotes (159)

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Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
Andre Weil
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Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced . . . the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously . . . this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work. . . .
Andre Weil
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For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.
W. W. Rouse Ball
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Babbage ... gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate 'the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.'
W. W. Rouse Ball
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[Gauss calculated the elements of the planet Ceres] and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.'
W. W. Rouse Ball
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Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.
W. W. Rouse Ball
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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.
Eric Temple Bell
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[Asked whether he would like to see an experimental demonstration of conical refraction] No. I have been teaching it all my life, and I do not want to have my ideas upset.
Isaac Todhunter
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The best theory is inspired by practice.
Donald Knuth
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AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.
Donald Knuth
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I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.
Donald Knuth
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Software Engineering is that part of Computer Science which is too difficult for the Computer Scientist.
Friedrich L. Bauer
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It is much more rewarding to do more with less.
Donald Knuth
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The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.
Karl Pearson
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Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.
Felix Klein
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Meta-design is much more difficult than design it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.
Donald Knuth
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When a branch of mathematics ceases to interest any but the specialists, it is very near its death, or at any rate dangerously close to a paralysis, from which it can be rescued only by being plunged back into the vivifying source of the science.
Andre Weil
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What is crucial is there be laws.
Andre Weil
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Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
Donald Knuth
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I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.
Donald Knuth
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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.
Isaac Barrow
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Isolated, so-called pretty theorems have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new pretty flower has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.
Hermann Hankel
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Every one who understands the subject will agree that even the basis on which the scientific explanation of nature rests is intelligible only to those who have learned at least the elements of the differential and integral calculus, as well as analytical geometry.
Felix Klein
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Intuition makes much of it I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different it does not fail to lead us astray quite often.
Andre Weil
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