James Whitbread Lee Glaisher Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

In other branches of science, where quick publication seems to be so much desired, there may possibly be some excuse for giving to the world slovenly or ill-digested work, but there is no such excuse in mathematics. The form ought to be as 102 perfect as the substance, and the demonstrations as rigorous as those of Euclid. The mathematician has to deal with the most exact facts of Nature, and he should spare no effort to render his interpretation worthy of his subject, and to give to his work its highest degree of perfection. Pauca sed matura was Gauss's motto.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
The invention of logarithms and the calculation of the earlier tables form a very striking episode in the history of exact science, and, with the exception of the Principia of Newton, there is no mathematical work published in the country which has produced such important consequences, or to which so much interest attaches as to Napier's Descriptio.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
[Lockyer] sometimes forgets he is only the editor and not the author of Nature.
Of Norman Lockyer

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not; he must take care not to be the slave of his symbols, but always to have before his mind the realities which they merely serve to express. For these and other reasons it seems to me of the highest importance that a mathematician should be trained in no narrow school; a wide course of reading in the first few years of his mathematical study cannot fail to influence for good the character of the whole of his subsequent work

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
It is not without some compensating advantages. In these days when science is so much subdivided it is well that students of subjects even so diverse as those with which we have to deal should occasionally meet on common ground, and have the opportunity of learning from each other's lips the kind of work in which they are engaged.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
I am sure that no subject loses more than mathematics by any attempt to dissociate it from its history.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
The value of [pi] has engaged the attention of many mathematicians and calculators from the time of Archimedes to the present day, and has been computed from so many different formulae, that a complete account of its calculation would almost amount to a history of mathematics.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher