German Mathematician Quotes

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters — having once tasted of this food they can never give it up.

Leopold Kronecker

Most often it is the case that people know that something big can be manipulated with it [i. e., the screw], but not how and in what way it is connected to time, and that untold time, and finally such force of machines, wheels, and shafts is necessary as cannot be produced nor be had.

Miracles are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Mathematics is perfectly free in its development and is subject only to the obvious consideration, that its concepts must be free from contradictions in themselves, as well as definitely and orderly related by means of definitions to the previously existing and established concepts.

One cannot require that everything shall be defined, any more than one can require that a chemist shall decompose every substance.