Morris Kline

Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire.

— Morris Kline

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without…

— Morris Kline

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

— Morris Kline

In brief, the whole world is the totality of mathematically expressible motions of objects in space and time, and the entire universe…

— Morris Kline

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

— Morris Kline

Though determinants and matrices received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century and thousands of papers were written on these…

— Morris Kline

“All mathematical proofs must be deductive. Each proof is a chain of deductive arguments, each of which has its premises and conclusion.”

— Morris Kline

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.

— Morris Kline

Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by the author stating why he is publishing the article, and…

— Morris Kline

There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

— Morris Kline

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

— Morris Kline

[The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own…

— Morris Kline

“same phenomenon and concludes that the phenomenon will always occur. Conclusions obtained by induction seem well warranted”

— Morris Kline

On all levels primary, and secondary and undergraduate - mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to…

— Morris Kline

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

— Morris Kline

“Because we are forced to learn about numbers and operations with numbers while we are still too young to appreciate them—a preparation…

— Morris Kline

Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity…

— Morris Kline

Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.

— Morris Kline

The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical…

— Morris Kline

Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.

— Morris Kline

Actually, most mathematics courses do not teach reasoning of any kind. Students are so baffled by the material that they are obliged…

— Morris Kline

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The…

— Morris Kline