42 Quotes by 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 the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

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

A rational mind is sometimes the queerestmixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.

Commenting on the return of Descartes’ remains to his native France, Jacobi remarks that “It is often more convenient to possess the ashes of great men than to possess the men themselves during their lifetime.

The mathematical exposition is extremely concise and occasionally awkward. Laplace was interested in results, not in how he got them. To avoid condensing a complicated mathematical argument to a brief, intelligible form he frequently omits everything but the conclusion, with the optimistic remark “Il est aisé à voir” (It is easy to see). He himself would often be unable to restore the reasoning by which he had “seen” these easy things without hours—sometimes days—of hard labor.

Asked some years later how he (Abel) had managed to forge ahead so rapidly to the front rank he replied, “By studying the masters, not their pupils”- a prescription some popular writers of textbooks might do well to mention in their prefaces as an antidote to the poisonous mediocrity of their uninspired pedagogics.

The hippopotamus is said to have a tender heart by those who have eaten that delicacy baked, so a thick skin is not necessarily a reliable index to what is inside the man.

In all that galaxy of talent there was no brighter star than Niels Henrik Abel, the man of whom Hermite said, “He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

As Whitehead has observed, “No Roman lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram.