Eric Temple Bell - The development of mathematics (1940)

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Eric Temple Bell Quotes
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
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
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
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
The root of these troubles seems to be the unimaginative lack of a clearly recognized objective. — If the aim is merely to create new theories which many find intensely interesting and even beautiful, then the abstract method keeps on reaching its goal.

Eric Temple Bell
We shall leave to the antiquarians the difficult and delicate task of restoring the roses to the cheeks of mathematical mummies.

Eric Temple Bell
The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

Eric Temple Bell
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

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

Eric Temple Bell