All Eric Temple Bell Quotes
- 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… Abel
- 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… All
- Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler. Fashion
- Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics. Dangerous
- Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. 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… Algebraic
- I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly. Always Hated
- 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… Anything Merely
- The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes. Abstract
- 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… Abstractness
- 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… Any
- It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences. Disconcerting
- Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic… All
- 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… All
- 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… Akin
- [As a young teenager] Galois read [Legendre's] geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn. Boys
- 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… Any
- The Handmaiden of the Sciences. Funny
- If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number. Asserted
- 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… Certainty
- If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer… Asserted
- Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. Absolute
- The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future. Been
- Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us. All
- The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity. Elementary