Hermann Hankel Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

Mathematics, considered as a science, owes its origin to the idealistic needs of the Greek philosophers, and not as fable has it, to the practical demands of Egyptian economics.... Adam was no zoologist when he gave names to the beasts of the field, nor were the Egyptian surveyors mathematicians.

Hermann Hankel
If we consult reason, experience, and the common testimony of ancient and modern times, none of our intellectual studies tend to cultivate a smaller number of the faculties, in a more partial or feeble manner, than mathematics. This is acknowledged by every writer on education of the least pretension to judgment and experience.

Hermann Hankel
Mathematics pursues its own course unrestrained, not indeed with an unbridled license which submits to no laws, but rather with the freedom which is determined by its own nature and in conformity with its own being.

Hermann Hankel
In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generation adds a new story to the old structure.

Hermann Hankel
The purely formal sciences, logic and mathematics, deal with those relations which are, or can be, independent of the particular content or the substance of objects. To mathematics in particular fall those relations between objects which involve the concepts of magnitude, of measure and of number.

Hermann Hankel