705 Quotes About Mathematics

For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.

In Mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

...and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.

He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss}

[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

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

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.