Eric Temple Bell > Quotes

“Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré had, and none in his superior in the gift of clear exposition.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.”
― Eric Temple Bell

“[As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]'s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“Asked some years later how he (Abel) had managed to forge ahead so rapidly to the front rank he replied, “By studying the masters, not their pupils”- a prescription some popular writers of textbooks might do well to mention in their prefaces as an antidote to the poisonous mediocrity of their uninspired pedagogics.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.”
― Eric Temple Bell

“Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.”
― John Taine

“A rational mind is sometimes the queerest
mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.”
― Eric Temple Bell

“As Whitehead has observed, “No Roman lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a severely technical sense—that of the modern postulational method which, as a matter of fact, was exploited by Euclid. The assumptions from which mathematics starts are simple; the rest is not.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science

“Today it is given in the textbooks as an example which young students dispose of in twenty minutes or less. Yet it held Newton up for twenty years. He finally solved it, of course”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science

“Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week.”
― Eric Temple Bell

“Although he was a limited mathematician with no pretensions to scientific greatness, Crelle was a broadminded man, in fact a great man.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (Touchstone Books

“Clarity is, indeed, all the more necessary when one essays to lead the reader farther from the beaten path and into wilder territory- Joseph Liouville”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“EULER CALCULATED WITHOUT APPARENT EFFORT, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind” (as Arago said), is not an exaggeration of the unequalled mathematical facility of Leonard Euler (1707-1783)”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“In 1835 the Academy of Sciences began publishing its weekly bulletin (the Comptes rendus). Here was a virgin dumping ground for Cauchy, and he began swamping the new publication with notes and lengthy memoirs- sometimes more than one a week. Dismayed at the rapidly mounting bill for printing, the Academy passed a rule, in force today, prohibiting the publication of an article over four pages long. This cramped Cauchy’s luxuriant style, and his longer memoirs, including a great one of 300 pages on the theory of numbers, were published elsewhere.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“Commenting on the return of Descartes’ remains to his native France, Jacobi remarks that “It is often more convenient to possess the ashes of great men than to possess the men themselves during their lifetime.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.”
― eric temple bell

“In all that galaxy of talent there was no brighter star than Niels Henrik Abel, the man of whom Hermite said, “He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.”
― Eric Temple Bell

“Strange as it may seem, not all of the great mathematicians have been professors in colleges or universities. Quite a few were soldiers by profession; others went into mathematics from theology, the law, and medicine, and one of the greatest was as crooked a diplomat as ever lied for the good of his country. A few have had no profession at all. Stranger yet, not all professors of mathematics have been mathematicians. But this should not surprise us when we think of the gulf between the average professor of poetry drawing a comfortable salary and the poet starving to death in his garret.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (Touchstone Books

“The hippopotamus is said to have a tender heart by those who have eaten that delicacy baked, so a thick skin is not necessarily a reliable index to what is inside the man.”
― eric temple bell

“The predatory barons, kings, and princelings of the Middle Ages had bred a swarm of rulers with the political ethics of highway robbers and, for the most part, the intellects of stable boys.”
― E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (Touchstone Books

“Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.”
― Eric Temple Bell, The Development of Mathematics

“A new concept may be “in the air” for generations until some one man—occasionally two or three together—sees clearly the essential detail that his predecessors missed, and the new thing comes into being. Relativity, for example, is sometimes said to have been the great invention reserved by time for the genius of Minkowski. The fact is, however, that Minkowski did not create the theory of relativity and that Einstein did. It seems rather meaningless to say that So-and-so might have done this or that if circumstances had been other than they were. Any one of us no doubt could jump over the moon if we and the physical universe were different from what we and it are, but the truth is that we do not make the jump.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“The mathematics of probability enters when we seek a method for enumerating possible cases without actually counting them off”
― Eric Temple Bell

“Lagrange’s father, once Treasurer of War for Sardinia, married Marie-Thérèse Gros, the only daughter of a wealthy physician of Cambiano, by whom he had eleven children. Of this numerous brood only the youngest, Joseph-Louis, born on January 25, 1736, survived beyond infancy.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (Touchstone Books

“The mathematical exposition is extremely concise and occasionally awkward. Laplace was interested in results, not in how he got them. To avoid condensing a complicated mathematical argument to a brief, intelligible form he frequently omits everything but the conclusion, with the optimistic remark “Il est aisé à voir” (It is easy to see). He himself would often be unable to restore the reasoning by which he had “seen” these easy things without hours—sometimes days—of hard labor.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“Replying two weeks later he states his opinion of Fermat’s Last Theorem. “I am very much obliged for your news concerning the Paris prize. But I confess that Fermat’s Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics

“He (Gauss) lives everywhere in mathematics”
― Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics