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It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

Henri Poincare

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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
Chance
Wary
Simple
Unnoticed
Must
Hypothesis
Chances
Passings
Passing
Mathematics
Ones
Hypotheses

More quotes by Henri Poincare

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We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
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...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know
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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.
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Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.
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Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
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If we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics? But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness? Man, then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy without it.
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If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living
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In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind. Now, they invent them deliberately just to invalidate our ancestors' reasoning, and that is all they are ever going to get out of them.
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A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us.
Henri Poincare
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The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self. It knows how to choose and to divine.
Henri Poincare
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Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
Henri Poincare
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. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
Henri Poincare
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In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind.
Henri Poincare
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One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient.
Henri Poincare
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The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law. They reveal the kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.
Henri Poincare
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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
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I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.
Henri Poincare
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The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
Henri Poincare
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Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
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But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.
Henri Poincare