19th-century Mathematician Quotes

Mathematicians have never been in full agreement on their science, though it is said to be the science of self-evident verities — absolute, indisputable and definitive. They have always been in controversy over the developing aspects of mathematics, and they have always considered their own age to be a period of crisis.

A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

Karl Weierstrass

To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.

Hilda Phoebe Hudson

An experiment is a question which man asks of nature; one result of the observation is an answer which nature yields to man.

Ferdinand Gonseth

The theory that has had the greatest development in recent times is without any doubt the theory of functions.

Mathematics, like a millstone, grinds everything placed under it and, just as you won't get wheat flour by grinding Deadly Nightshade, you won't get the truth from the false premises even if you cover the page with formulae...

The doctrines of pure geometry often, and in many questions, give a simple and natural way to penetrate to the origin of truths, to lay bare the mysterious chain which unites them, and to make them known individually, luminously and completely.

The simplicity of nature which we at present grasp is really the result of infinite complexity; and that below the uniformity there underlies a diversity whose depths we have not yet probed, and whose secret places are still beyond our reach.

William Spottiswoode

The stupendous size of the universe hushes thought itself.

Edward Burr Van Vleck

Functions, just like living beings are characterized by their singularities.

The fundamental importance of the subject of order may be inferred from the fact that all the concepts required in geometry can be expressed in terms of the concept of order alone.

Edward Vermilye Huntington

Change is a perichoretical synechy of pamparallagmatic and porroteroporeumatical differentiations and integrations.

Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls, And so on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

I cannot tell you the efforts to which I was condemned to understand something of the diagrams of Descriptive Geometry, which I detest.

Charles Hermite

It was my lot to plant the harpoon of algebraic topology into the body of the whale of algebraic geometry.

Solomon Lefschetz

It is a curious circumstance that a science so profoundly mathematical as the theory of probability should have originated in the games of chance which occupy the thoughtless and the profligate.

Robert Simpson Woodward

To the workaday world the higher ranges of mathematics have been a sealed book; the man who traverses them successfully a magician - a man whose mental occupations awaken mingled feelings of awe and pity, awe that he can soar so high, pity that he wastes his strength in such useless flight.

Clarence Abiathar Waldo

In early times of Christianity, even those who used animal food themselves came to think of the vegetarian as one who lived a higher life, and approached more nearly to Christian perfection.

It is important for him who wants to discover not to confine himself to one chapter of science, but to keep in touch with various others.

Jacques Hadamard

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.

At the present time our actions are largely influenced by our theories. We have abandoned the simple and instinctive mode of life of the earlier civilisations for one regulated by the assumptions of our knowledge and supplemented by all the devices of intelligence.

Charles Howard Hinton

Mathematics is one of the oldest of the sciences; it is also one of the most active, for its strength is the vigor of perpetual youth.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

Alfred Pringsheim

Mathematics is the hypothetico-deductive science.

In other words, without a theory, a plan, the mere mechanical manipulation of the numbers in a problem does not necessarily make sense just because you are using Arithmetic!

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber