Eric Temple Bell Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

The so-called obvious was repeatedly scrutinized from every angle and was frequently found to be not obvious but false. "Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future; and should analysis ever appear to be without or blemish, its perfection might only be that of death.

Eric Temple Bell
Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.

Eric Temple Bell
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

Eric Temple Bell
Some, of my unmathematical friends have incautiously urged me to include a note about the origin of modern calculating machines. This is the proper place to do so, as the Queen of queens has enslaved a few of these infernal things to do some of her more repulsive drudgery. What I shall say about these marvelous aids to the feeble human intelligence will be little indeed, for two reasons: I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

Eric Temple Bell
Fashion as king is sometimes a very stupid ruler. As was observed a little way back, the kernel of Plücker's theory of geometric dimensionality is that the dimensionality of a given space is not an absolute constant, but depends upon the elements, accepted as irreducible, in terms of which the space is described.

Eric Temple Bell
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity.

Eric Temple Bell
This is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put "common sense" where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled "discarded nonsense."

Eric Temple Bell
Fools have always been governed by fools and doubtless always will be, but not all scientists and mathematicians are yet fools.

Eric Temple Bell
Wisdom was not born with us, nor will it perish when we descend into the shadows with a regretful backward glance that other eyes than ours are already lit by the dawn of a new and truer mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell
There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinions as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

Eric Temple Bell
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so also can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

Eric Temple Bell
All measurements in science are statistical in character.

Eric Temple Bell
The toughminded suggest that the theory of the infinite elaborated by the great mathematicians of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, without which mathematical analysis as it is actually used today is impossible, has been committing suicide in an unnecessarily prolonged and complicated manner for the past half century.

Eric Temple Bell
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

Eric Temple Bell
The straight line of the geometers does not exist in the material universe. It is a pure abstraction, an invention of the imagination or, if one prefers, an idea of the Eternal Mind.

Eric Temple Bell
The distinction between the mathematical method and the scientific is seen in the agonies of very young children to do what their teachers sometimes tell them is mathematics. Anyone who was subjected to elementary geometry when his infantile brain was as unripe as a green walnut will recall the protracted misery he endured.

Eric Temple Bell
The statistical method is social mathematics par excellence.

Eric Temple Bell
The tensor calculus that cost Einstein an effort to master is now a regular part of an undergraduate course in the better technical schools. The subject has been so thoroughly emulsified that even an eighteen-year-old can swallow it without regurgitating. But this does not prove that wither his brain or his stomach is stronger than Einstein's was.

Eric Temple Bell
This does not mean that objections cannot be well taken: it merely calls attention to the fact that in mathematics, as in everything else, this earth is not yet to be confused with the Kingdom of Heaven.

Eric Temple Bell