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We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

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Carl Friedrich Gauss
Age: 77 †
Born: 1777
Born: April 30
Died: 1855
Died: February 23
Astronomer
Geodesist
Geophysicist
Mathematician
Physicist
Science Writer
Statistician
University Teacher
Braunschweig
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss
Karl Gauss
C. F. Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauß
Gauß
Carl Friedrich
Gauss
Numbers
Mathematics
Priori
Space
Humility
Prescribe
Reality
Property
Properties
Cannot
Minds
Purely
Must
Products
Admit
Mind
Number
Mathematical
Completely
Math
Outside
Product

More quotes by Carl Friedrich Gauss

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I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
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In mathematics there are no true controversies.
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Finally, two days ago, I succeeded - not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.
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For three days now this angel, almost too heavenly for earth has been my fiancée ... Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant colours. Upon his engagement to Johanne Osthof of Brunswick they married 9 Oct 1805.
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Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
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It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess to thy laws my services are bound.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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In the last two months I have been very busy with my own mathematical speculations, which have cost me much time, without my having reached my original goal. Again and again I was enticed by the frequently interesting prospects from one direction to the other, sometimes even by will-o'-the-wisps, as is not rare in mathematic speculations.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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The higher arithmetic presents us with an inexhaustible store of interesting truths - of truths, too, which are not isolated, but stand in a close internal connection, and between which, as our knowledge increases, we are continually discovering new and sometimes wholly unexpected ties.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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My young friend, I wish that science would intoxicate you as much as our good Göttingen beer! Upon seeing a student staggering down a street.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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...as our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Sin2 φ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it should it be feared that sin2 φ might become ambiguous, which would perhaps never occur, or at most very rarely when speaking of sin(φ2), well then, let us write (sin φ)2, but not sin2 φ, which by analogy should signify sin (sin φ)
Carl Friedrich Gauss
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I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.
Carl Friedrich Gauss