Eric Temple Bell Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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
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
That wretched monosyllable "all" has caused mathematicians more trouble than all the rest of the dictionary.

Eric Temple Bell
Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Eric Temple Bell
Just as "beauty is its own excuse for being," so mathematics needs no apology for existing.

Eric Temple Bell
If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell
No satisfactory justification has ever been given for connecting in any way the consequences of mathematical reasoning with the physical world.

Eric Temple Bell