André Weil Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

André Weil
First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.

André Weil
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously. This feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work.

André Weil
Mathematics has this peculiarity, that it is not understood by non-mathematicians.

André Weil
It [the mathematician] be asked why he persists on the high glaciers whither no one but his own kind can follow him, he will answer... For the honor of the human spirit. The Future of Mathematics

André Weil
Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to man. It does not consist in proving everything, but in maintaining a sharp distinction between what is assumed and what is proved, and in endeavoring to assume as little as possible at every stage.

André Weil
But, if logic is the hygiene of the mathematician, it is not his source of food; the great problems furnish the daily bread on which he thrives.

André Weil
Strategy means the art of recognizing the main problems, attacking them at their weak points, setting up future lines of advance. Mathematical strategy is concerned with long-range objectives; it requires a deep understanding of broad trends and of the evolution of ideas over long periods.

André Weil
The mathematician... believe[s] that he will be able to slake his thirst at the very sources of knowledge, convinced as he is that they will always continue to pour forth, pure and abundant, while others have to have recourse to the muddy streams of a sordid reality.

André Weil
A tediously laborious proof may be a sign that the writer has been less than felicitous in expressing himself; but more often than not, as we know, it indicates that he has been laboring under limitations which prevented him from translating directly into words or formulas some very simple ideas.

André Weil
In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.

André Weil
We know only too well... that one should not invariably assume a mathematician to be fully aware of the work of his predecessors, even when he includes it among his references; which one of us has read all the books he has listed in the bibliographies of his own writings?

André Weil
When a branch of mathematics ceases to interest any but the specialists, it is very near its death, or at any rate dangerously close to paralysis, from which it can be rescued only by being plunged back into the vivifying source of the science.

André Weil