E. W. Hobson Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Success, even in a comparatively limited field, is some compensation for failure in a wider field of endeavour.

E. W. Hobson
Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.

E. W. Hobson
As in Mathematics in general, the really great advances, embodying new ideas of far-reaching fruitfullness, have been due to an exceedingly small number of great men... there are periods when for a long series of centuries no advance was made; when the results obtained in a more enlightened age have been forgotten. We observe the times of revival, when the older learning has been rediscovered, and when the results of the progress made in distinct countries have been made available as the starting points of new efforts and a fresh period of activity.

E. W. Hobson
Perhaps the least inadequate description of the general scope of modern Pure Mathematics—I will not call it a definition—would be to say that it deals with form, in a very general sense of the term; this would include algebraic form, functional relationship, the relations of order in any ordered set of entities such as numbers, and the analysis of the peculiarities of form of groups of operations.

E. W. Hobson
We are able to appreciate the difficulties which in each age restricted the progress which could be made within limits which could not be surpassed by the means then available; we see how, when new weapons became available, a new race of thinkers turned to the further consideration of the problem with a new outlook.

E. W. Hobson
The history of our problem falls into three periods marked out by fundamentally distinct differences in respect of method, of immediate aims, and in equipment in possession of intellectual tools.

E. W. Hobson
In the year 1775, the Paris Academy found it necessary to protect its officials against the waste of time and energy involved in examining the efforts of circle squarers. It passed a resolution... that no more solutions were to be examined of the problem of the duplication of the cube, the trisection of the angle, the quadrature of the circle, and the same resolution should apply to machines for exhibiting perpetual motion. an account... drawn up by Condorcet... is appended. It is interesting to remark that the strength of the conviction of Mathematicians that the solution of the problem is impossible, more than a century before an irrefutable proof of the correctness of that conviction was discovered.

E. W. Hobson
The quality of the human mind, considered in its collective aspect, which most strikes us, in surveying this record, is its colossal patience.

E. W. Hobson
The objects of abstract Geometry possess in absolute precision properties which are only approximately realized in the corresponding objects of physical Geometry.

E. W. Hobson
If the question be raised, why such an apparently special problem as the quadrature of the circle, is deserving of the sustained interest which has attained to it, and which it still possesses, the answer is only to be found in a scrutiny of the history of the problem, and especially in the closeness of the connection of that history with the general history of Mathematical Science.

E. W. Hobson
I propose to address to you a few remarks, necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, upon the scope and tendencies of modern mathematics.

E. W. Hobson
Probably no other department of knowledge plays a larger part outside its own narrower domain than mathematics. Some of its more elementary conceptions and methods have become part of the common heritage of our civilization, interwoven in the every-day life of the people.

E. W. Hobson
A great department of thought must have its own inner life, however transcendent may be the importance of its relations to the outside. No department of science, least of all one requiring so high a degree of mental concentration as Mathematics, can be developed entirely, or even mainly, with a view to applications outside its own range.

E. W. Hobson