Morris Kline Quotes

13 quotes in 251 categories

• [The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to…
• Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it…
• On all levels primary, and secondary and undergraduate - mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to the real world.…
• The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, refuge from…
• Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.
• Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.
• Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.
• Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire.
• A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.
• The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The books are not…
• A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.
• The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder…
• There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

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