Quote

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

Henri Poincare

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henri Poincare
Age: 58 †
Born: 1854
Born: April 29
Died: 1912
Died: July 17
Astronomer
Engineer
Mathematician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Science
Physicist
Researcher
Topologist
University Teacher
Le Cateau
Jules Henri Poincaré
Poincaré
Henri Poincare
Jules Henri Poincare
Poincare
Science
Night
Two
Thought
Everything
Nights
Long
Flash
Thinking
Mathematical
Mathematics

More quotes by Henri Poincare

Image
Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?
Henri Poincare
Image
Ideas rose in clouds I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
Henri Poincare
Image
But all of my efforts served only to make me better acquainted with the difficulty, which in itself was something.
Henri Poincare
Image
How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ... and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.
Henri Poincare
Image
Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies it can create nothing new not from it alone can any science issue.
Henri Poincare
Image
Analyse data just so far as to obtain simplicity and no further.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only.
Henri Poincare
Image
Most striking at first is the appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long unconscious prior work.
Henri Poincare
Image
It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.
Henri Poincare
Image
All of mathematics is a tale about groups.
Henri Poincare
Image
The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self. It knows how to choose and to divine.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare
Image
Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
Henri Poincare
Image
Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
Henri Poincare
Image
Zero is the number of objects that satisfy a condition that is never satisfied. But as never means in no case, I do not see that any progress has been made.
Henri Poincare
Image
All great progress takes place when two sciences come together, and when their resemblance proclaims itself, despite the apparent disparity of their substance.
Henri Poincare
Image
The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
Henri Poincare
Image
One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient.
Henri Poincare
Image
For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.
Henri Poincare