Eric Temple Bell - Mathematicians Quotes

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

Eric Temple Bell
If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact.

Eric Temple Bell
Mathematics by itself has seldom got very far in the exploration of nature, as is attested by the numerous attempts of pure mathematicians of the past and present to resolve the universe with pencil and paper.

Eric Temple Bell
An expert logician will not necessarily be a passable mathematician for all his skill in logic, any more than a scholarly prosodist will be a respectable poet for all his mastery of meter.

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