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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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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
Reality
Existed
Feels
External
Even
Sees
Would
Independent
World
Completely
Forever
Conceives
Science
Inaccessible
Spirit
Impossibility

More quotes by 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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Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
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Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose.
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One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
Henri Poincare
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Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
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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.
Henri Poincare
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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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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.
Henri Poincare
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Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.
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The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.
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Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.
Henri Poincare
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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
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Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.
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When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole it is to intuition that we must look for it.
Henri Poincare
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It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.
Henri Poincare
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Intuition is more important to discovery than logic.
Henri Poincare
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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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. . . 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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But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.
Henri Poincare
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Most striking at first is the appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long unconscious prior work.
Henri Poincare