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Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

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
Generations
Small
Born
Spontaneity
Great
Discoveries
Never
Spontaneous
Mathematical
Discovery
Generation

More quotes by Henri Poincare

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Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
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But all of my efforts served only to make me better acquainted with the difficulty, which in itself was something.
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The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
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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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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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If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
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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.
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What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
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A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
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Les faits ne parlent pas. Facts do not speak.
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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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Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
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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.
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One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient.
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Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.
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Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and subconscious.
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Intuition is more important to discovery than logic.
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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.
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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.
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What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
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