Scottish Mathematician Quotes

John Napier

Colin Maclaurin

John Playfair

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

George Peacock

Thomas Chalmers

It is not scholarship alone, but scholarship impregnated with religion, that tells on the great mass of society. We have no faith in the efficacy of mechanic's institutes, or even of primary and elementary schools, for building up a virtuous and well conditioned peasantry, so long as they stand dissevered from the lessons of Christian piety.

Thomas Chalmers

I Gladly avail myself of the opportunity of inscribing to you, for a second time, a work of mine on Algebra, as a sincere tribute of my respect, affection and gratitude.
I trust that I shall not be considered as derogating from the higher duties which, (in common with you), I owe to my station in the Church, if I continue to devote some portion of the leisure at my command, to the completion of an extensive Treatise, embracing the more important departments of Analysis, the execution of which I have long contemplated, and which, in its first volume I now offer to the public, under the auspices of one of my best and dearest friends.

It is a certain fact, that, in mathematicians who have confined their studies to mathematics alone, there has often been observed a proneness to that species of religious enthusiasm in which imagination is the predominant element, and which, like a contagion, is propagated in a crowd.

We can land men on the moon, but, for all our mechanical and electronic wizardry, we cannot reproduce an artificial fore-finger that can feel as well as beckon.

To seek not for end but for antecedents is the way of the physicist, who finds "causes" in what he has learned to recognise as fundamental properties, or inseparable concomitants, or unchanging laws, of matter and of energy.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

A change 'in the animal kingdom seems to be a part of the order of nature, and is visible in instances to which human power cannot have extended.'

The fixed stars appear to be of different bignesses, not because they really are so, but because they are not all equally distant from us; those that are nearest will excel in Luster and Bigness; the more remote stars will give a fainter Light, and appear smaller to the Eye.

The processes of nature lie so deep, that, after all the pains we can take, much, perhaps, will remain undiscovered beyond the reach of human art or skill. But this is no reason why we should give ourselves up to the belief of fictions, be they ever so ingenious, instead of hearkening to the unerring voice of nature...

Colin Maclaurin