Eric Temple Bell Quotes

27 quotes in 417 categories

• In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the…
• Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something…
• Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.
• Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
• Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
• Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without…
• I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
• If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it…
• The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
• Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of…
• Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the…
• It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
• Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic…
• The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus…
• Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the…
• [As a young teenager] Galois read [Legendre's] geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.
• The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities…
• The Handmaiden of the Sciences.
• If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.
• Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the…

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