19th-century Mathematician Quotes

David Hilbert

Henri Poincaré

Alfred North Whitehead

Niels Henrik Abel

John Herschel

Bernhard Riemann

Georg Cantor

The general phenomenon [total eclipse] is perhaps the most awfully grand which man can witness.

George Biddell Airy

What is familiar to professional scientists highly needs to be placed in the public domain.

Jacques Babinet

The most accomplished in the use of symbols must sometimes throw aside his abstractions and resort to homelier methods for trial and verification - not doubting, in so doing, the truth which lies at the bottom of his symbolism, but distrusting his own powers.

Mathematics is perfectly free in its development and is subject only to the obvious consideration, that its concepts must be free from contradictions in themselves, as well as definitely and orderly related by means of definitions to the previously existing and established concepts.

It may have occurred (and very naturally too) to such as have had the curiosity to read the title of this lecture, that it must necessarily be a very dry and difficult subject; interesting to very few, intelligible to still fewer, and, above all, utterly incapable of adequate treatment within the limits of a discourse like this.

William Kingdon Clifford

As a boy of six I could understand the proof of a mathematical theorem more readily than that meat had to be cut with one's knife, not one's fork.

Ferdinand Eisenstein

To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory.

Paul Sophus Epstein

One cannot require that everything shall be defined, any more than one can require that a chemist shall decompose every substance.

[Mathematics] is the work of the human mind, which is destined rather to study than to know, to seek the truth rather than to find it.

Évariste Galois

The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance...

William Rowan Hamilton

A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

If science may be vilified by representing it as opposed to religion, or trammeled by mistaken notions of the danger of free enquiry, there is yet another mode by which it may be degraded from its native dignity, and that is by placing it in the light of a mere appendage to and caterer for our pampered appetites.

The infinite, like no other problem, has always deeply moved the soul of men. The infinite, like no other idea, has had a stimulating and fertile influence upon the mind. But the infinite is also more than any other concept, in need of clarification.

Mathematics exists solely for the honour of the human mind.

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

Time figures as the mortar which binds the bricks of matter together.

Scientific theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand in hand.

Cargill Gilston Knott

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters — having once tasted of this food they can never give it up.

Leopold Kronecker

Please forget whatever you've been studying at school; for you have not learned it.

Nature has raised the curtain of futurity, and displayed before him [Man] the succession of her decrees, so far as they effect the physical universe, for countless ages to come; and the revelations of which she has made him the instrument, are supported and verified by a never-ceasing train of predictions fulfilled.

Dionysius Lardner

An advantage could consist not only in a single important advantage but also in a multitude of insignificant advantages.

The referee said it was not acceptable, but the Press considered they could not refuse to publish a book by a professor of the university.

John Edensor Littlewood

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

I had expressed my wish to have a thermometer of probability, with impossibility at one end, as 2 plus 2 makes 5, and necessity at the other as 2 plus 2 make 4.

Augustus De Morgan

Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define.