John Lighton Synge Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

The northern ocean is beautiful,... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.

John Lighton Synge
Life is complicated enough... without inventing hypothetical complications.

John Lighton Synge
The modern mathematician weaves an intricate pattern of microscopic precision. To him, a false statement — an exception to a general statement — is an unforgiving sin. The heroic mathematician, on the other hand, paints with broad splashes of color, with a grand contempt for singular cases until they could no longer be avoided.

John Lighton Synge
Mathematics begins in bewilderment and ends in bewilderment.

John Lighton Synge
There is a fascination about the impossible... which is responsible for the dreams and fantasies with which we are all familiar. Everything which is possible becomes banal. Only the inaccessible is worthy of our passions.

John Lighton Synge
Anyone who studies relativity without understanding how to use simple space-time diagrams is as much inhibited as a student of functions of a complex variable who does not understand the Argads diagram.

John Lighton Synge
A well built theory has three merits: (i) it has an aesthetic appeal, (ii) it is comparatively easy to understand, and (iii), if its postulates are clearly stated, it may be taken out of its original physical context and applied in another.

John Lighton Synge
A statement acquires meaning (and truth or falsehood) only when interpreted against a background.

John Lighton Synge
Knowledge is alive. It creeps, it grows, it crawls, it jumps. It never stays quite still. We add to it. We tear it in pieces. We put it together again, and then it is a different knowledge.

John Lighton Synge