Eric Temple Bell

The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call…

— Eric Temple Bell

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

— Eric Temple Bell

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race…

— Eric Temple Bell

[As a young teenager] Galois read [Legendre's] geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

— Eric Temple Bell

Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the…

— Eric Temple Bell

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a…

— Eric Temple Bell

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the…

— Eric Temple Bell

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

— Eric Temple Bell

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to…

— Eric Temple Bell

Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for ordinary…

— Eric Temple Bell

Had Poincaré been as strong in practical science as he was in theoretical he might have made a fourth with the incomparable…

— Eric Temple Bell

Pick the assumptions to pieces till the stuff they are made of is exposed to plain view - this is the cardinal…

— Eric Temple Bell

A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and…

— Eric Temple Bell

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

— Eric Temple Bell

The Handmaiden of the Sciences.

— Eric Temple Bell

“Strange as it may seem, not all of the great mathematicians have been professors in colleges or universities. Quite a few were…

— Eric Temple Bell

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon…

— Eric Temple Bell

“In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading…

— Eric Temple Bell

“These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the…

— Eric Temple Bell

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also…

— Eric Temple Bell

Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

— Eric Temple Bell