Edward Kasner - Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)

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The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated.

Edward Kasner

Mathematics is often erroneously referred to as the science of common sense. Actually, it may transcend common sense and go beyond either imagination or intuition. It has become a very strange and perhaps frightening subject from the ordinary point of view, but anyone who penetrates into it will find a veritable fairyland, a fairyland which is strange, but makes sense, if not common sense.

Edward Kasner

Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.

Edward Kasner

Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.

Edward Kasner

Puzzles are made of the things that the mathematician, no less than the child, plays with, and dreams and wonders about, for they are made of things and circumstances of the world he [or she] live in.

Edward Kasner

There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician.

Edward Kasner