19th-century Mathematician Quotes

The mathematical theory of probability is a science which aims at reducing to calculation, where possible, the amount of credence due to propositions or statements, or to the occurrence of events, future or past, more especially as contingent or dependent upon other propositions or events the probability of which is known.

How can we doubt that of which every man is most certain even from his earliest infancy?

Federigo Enriques
Federigo Enriques
The characteristic which distinguishes the present-day professional statistician, is his interest and skill in the measurement of the fallibility of conclusions.

Figures may not lie, but statistics compiled unscientifically and analyzed incompetently are almost sure to be misleading, and when this condition is unnecessarily chronic the so-called statisticians may be called liars.

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

Vito Volterra
Vito Volterra
The infinite time of the geologists is in the past; and most of their speculations regarding this subject seem to imply the absolute infinity of time, as if the human imagination was unable to grasp the period of time requisite for the formation of a few inches of sand or feet of mud, and its subsequent consolidation into rock.

Truth is an absolute notion that science, which is not concerned with any such permanency, had better leave alone.

Mathematics deals mainly with realities and stern facts, and it arms those whose life work is beset with physical difficulties. Hence it appeals especially to the leaders of the common people, and it performs a fundamental function in the education of those who aim to excel in overcoming material difficulties.

As a professor of mathematics I am practically required by the ethics of the profession to be absent-minded, unmethodical, and inconsistent in many ways fatal to bibliographical excellence.

The different branches of algebra and analysis which have been investigated are so numerous that it would be quite impossible to give an approximately exhaustive representation even only of the most important problems, within the limits of the time allowed to me. I, therefore, have confined myself to the minimum admissible number, namely one.

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

Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz
Whether any other Mathematician will appear, possessing sufficient leisure, patience, and facility of computation, to calculate the value of [pi] to a still greater extent, remains to be seen: all that the Author can say is, he takes leave of the subject for the present...

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

Gravitation simply represents a continual effort of the universe to straighten itself out.

E. T. Whittaker
E. T. Whittaker
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.

All good teaching must flow from copious sources of knowledge. The shallow fountain cannot emit a vigorous stream.

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
William Spottiswoode
The application will then, sometimes directly, but more frequently through a chain of intermediate stages, have significant bearing upon the content of human experience and furnish results which may be called true. Their truth then gives, retroactively, a sound basis for belief in the validity of the conclusions of mathematics.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

Sofia Kovalevskaya
Sofia Kovalevskaya
If we have a certain class of objects and a certain class of relations and if the only questions which we investigate are whether ordered groups of these objects do or do not satisfy the relations, the results of the investigations are called mathematics.

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.

Andrew Forsyth
Andrew Forsyth
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...

Aleksey Krylov
Aleksey Krylov
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.

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

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.