19th-century Mathematician Quotes

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

Mathematics is the hypothetico-deductive science.

The mathematician's best work is art... a high and perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch each other.

Gösta Mittag-Leffler

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...

The specialist who wishes to accomplish work of the highest excellence must be learned in the resources of science and have constantly in mind its grandeur and meaning.

Percy Alexander MacMahon

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, that giant pincers of scientific logic.

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

E. T. Whittaker

There is a largeness about mathematics that transcends race and time: mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.

Herbert Turnbull

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

George W. Snedecor

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.

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

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

Alfred Pringsheim

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Solomon Lefschetz

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

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

Lewis Fry Richardson

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

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