Quote

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

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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
Numbers
Condition
Means
Satisfied
Mean
Case
Made
Number
Never
Objects
Conditions
Cases
Satisfy
Progress
Zero

More quotes by 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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Analyse data just so far as to obtain simplicity and no further.
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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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But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.
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Mathematicians are born, not made.
Henri Poincare
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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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One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient.
Henri Poincare
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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.
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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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Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer.
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Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new it alone can give us certainty.
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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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Ideas rose in clouds I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
Henri Poincare
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Les faits ne parlent pas. Facts do not speak.
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.
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Intuition is more important to discovery than logic.
Henri Poincare
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When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.
Henri Poincare
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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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Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
Henri Poincare
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All of mathematics is a tale about groups.
Henri Poincare