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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.
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
Mind
Invent
Something
Reasoning
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Invented
Useful
Function
Invalidate
Days
Deliberately
Ever
Ancestors
Going
Ancestor
More quotes by Henri Poincare
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.
Henri Poincare
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
Henri Poincare
It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.
Henri Poincare
The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
Henri Poincare
All of mathematics is a tale about groups.
Henri Poincare
Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
Henri Poincare
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
Intuition is more important to discovery than logic.
Henri Poincare
Analyse data just so far as to obtain simplicity and no further.
Henri Poincare
. . . 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
Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.
Henri Poincare
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
How is error possible in mathematics?
Henri Poincare
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
Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means.
Henri Poincare
What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
Henri Poincare
Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.
Henri Poincare
We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
Henri Poincare
Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.
Henri Poincare
