Eric Temple Bell Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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 would appear to put at least part of the Theory of Demonstration in a category with the efforts of beginners in Geometry: To prove that A equals B: let A equal B; therefore A equals B.

Eric Temple Bell
The algebraic numbers are spotted over the plane like stars against a black sky; the dense blackness is the firmament of the transcendentals.

Eric Temple Bell
A circle no doubt has a certain appealing simplicity at the first glance, but one look at a healthy ellipse should have convinced even the most mystical of astronomers that that the perfect simplicity of the circle is akin to the vacant smile of complete idiocy. Compared to what an ellipse can tell us, a circle has nothing to say.

Eric Temple Bell
The task of cleaning up mathematics and salvaging whatever can be saved from the wreckage of the past twenty years will probably be enough to occupy one generation.

Eric Temple Bell
Daniel Bernoulli has been called the father of mathematical physics.

Eric Temple Bell
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

Eric Temple Bell
In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."

Eric Temple Bell
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Eric Temple Bell
Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell
Some of his deepest discoveries were reasoned out verbally with very few if any symbols, and those for the most part mere abbreviations of words. Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week.

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
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions. Then, in the alleged proof, be alert for inexplicit assumptions. Euclid's notorious oversights drove this lesson home.

Eric Temple Bell
Perfection is a chimaera, and that, in the words of Crelle, we can only hope for closer and closer approximations to mathematical truth — whatever that may be, if anything.

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
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 cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.

Eric Temple Bell
Experiment as scientists understand it is admittedly an indispensable adjunct to the progress of civilization and its probable destruction.

Eric Temple Bell
The next fundamental assumption of the Pythagoreans lies much deeper, so deep in fact that civilized man can scarcely hope to fetch it up to the full light of reason. Odd numbers are male; even numbers, female. We can only ask why, expecting no answer except possibly a hesitant allusion to a vestigial phallicism or a forgotten Orphism.

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
With a literature much vaster than those of algebra and arithmetic combined, and as least as extensive as that of analysis, geometry is a richer treasure house of more interesting and half-forgotten things, which a hurried generation has no leisure to enjoy, than any other division of mathematics

Eric Temple Bell
Experience has taught most mathematicians that much that looks solid and satisfactory to one mathematical generation stands a fair chance of dissolving into cobwebs under the steadier scrutiny of the next...

Eric Temple Bell
Games of chance are probably as old as the human desire to get something for nothing; but their mathematical implications were appreciated only after Fermat and Pascal in 1654 reduced chance to law.

Eric Temple Bell
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

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
The mathematician is a much rarer character in fiction than his cousin the scientist, and when he does appear in the pages of a novel or on the screen he is only too apt to be a slovenly dreamer totally devoid of common sense — comic relief.

Eric Temple Bell
Mathematicians are not, as a rule, credulous; their clients almost invariably are.

Eric Temple Bell
Time is not the fourth dimension, for the sufficient reason that 'the fourth dimension' is a collection of three words without meaning.

Eric Temple Bell