Adventure Quote by Anonymous

Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has…

— Hermann Hankel

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

— Stanislaw Ulam

There are very few theorems in advanced analysis which have been demonstrated in a logically tenable manner. Everywhere one finds this miserable way of…

— Niels Henrik Abel

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

“Interesting-sounding, supposed applications of the incompleteness theorem [here earlier taken explicitly to refer to the incompleteness theorems as a whole] outside mathematics, therefore, often…

— Torkel Franz

I have found a very great number of exceedingly beautiful theorems.

— Pierre de Fermat

Unlike physics, for example, such parts of the bare bones of economic theory as are expressible in mathematical form are extremely easy compared with…

— John Maynard Keynes

Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation…

— Imre Lakatos

“Mathematicians have, according to Wright, been "unreasonably successful" in finding applications to apparently useless theorems, and often years after the theorems were first discovered.”

— Alex Bellos

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one…

— Kurt Gödel

...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept…

— Paul Halmos