Italian Mathematician Quotes

Galileo Galilei

Gerolamo Cardano

Giuseppe Peano

Luca Pacioli

Vito Volterra

Federigo Enriques

Enrico Bombieri

SALVIATI: Now, since I wish to convince you by demonstrative reasoning rather than to persuade you by mere probabilities, I shall suppose that you are familiar with present-day mechanics...

Galileo Galilei

Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.

Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define.

My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this : PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST. The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about theexistence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time,..., or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs.

Bruno de Finetti

I swear to you by the Sacred Gospel, and on my faith as a gentleman, not only never to publish your discoveries, if you tell them to me, but I also promise and pledge my faith as a true Christian to put them down in cipher so that after my death no one shall be able to understand them.

Gerolamo Cardano

The Ancients, having taken into consideration the rigorous construction of the human body, elaborated all their works, as especially their holy temples, according to these proportions; for they found here the two principal figures without which no project is possible: the perfection of the circle, the principle of all regular bodies, and the equilateral square.

How can we doubt that of which every man is most certain even from his earliest infancy?

Federigo Enriques

To me, that the distribution of prime numbers can be so accurately represented in a harmonic analysis is absolutely amazing and incredibly beautiful. It tells of an arcane music and a secret harmony composed by the prime numbers.

Enrico Bombieri

The theory that has had the greatest development in recent times is without any doubt the theory of functions.

Mathematics is the hypothetico-deductive science.