Historian Of Mathematics

🇬🇧Karl Pearson

Mathematics

1857–1936

"For the present the Grammar may yet be of service. After an eight years' life and... 4000 copies, it reappears in a revised and enlarged form."

John Wallis

Mathematics

1616–1703

"Jakob Bernoulli, John Wallis, The Doctrine of Permutations and Combinations"

🇬🇧Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Mathematics

1941–2014

"The teaching of axioms should come after conveying the theory in a looser version."

🇺🇸Donald Knuth

Science

b. 1938

"People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird."

🇫🇷André Weil

Mathematics

1906–1998

"First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people."

🇩🇪Hans Freudenthal

Mathematics

1905–1990

"Learners should be allowed to find their own levels and explore the paths leading there with as much and as little guidance as each particular case requires."

🇬🇧Thomas Little Heath

Mathematics

1861–1940

"Eudoxus was perhaps the greatest of all Archimedes's predecessors, and it is his achievements, especially the discovery of the method of exhaustion, which interest us in connexion with Archimedes."

🇨🇭Florian Cajori

history of mathematics

1859–1930

"Comparatively few of the propositions and proofs in the Elements are his own discoveries. In fact, the proof of the "Theorem of Pythagoras" is the only one directly ascribed to him."

"It is a lucky thing that newspaper reporters do not attend these meetings. If they did, they would see how little our activities are related to the real needs of society."

🇺🇸Carl Benjamin Boyer

Mathematics

1906–1976

"But what, after all, are the integers? Everyone thinks that he or she knows, for example, what the number three is — until he or she tries to define or explain it."

"Aristotle had considered the question of whether space is infinite and gave six nonmathematical arguments to prove that it is finite; he foresaw that this question would be troublesome."

🇬🇧Isaac Barrow

Mathematics

1630–1677

"Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth."

🇺🇸Eric Temple Bell

Mathematics

1883–1960

"The so-called obvious was repeatedly scrutinized from every angle and was frequently found to be not obvious but false. "Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."

W. W. Rouse Ball

Mathematics

1850–1925

"Babbage was one of the founders of the Cambridge Analytical Society whose purpose he stated was to advocate "the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university."

🇬🇧George Frederick James Temple

Mathematics

1901–1992

"The 'language theory' is inadequate as a description of the nature of mathematics."

🇩🇪Felix Klein

Mathematics

1849–1925

"In ordinary geometry a surface is conceived as a locus of points; in Lie's geometry it appears as the totality of all the spheres having contact with the surface."

🇫🇷Jean Dieudonné

Mathematics

1906–1992

"A mathematician, then, will be defined in what follows as someone who has published the proof of at least one non-trivial theorem."

🇺🇸David Eugene Smith

Mathematics

1860–1944

"With the coming of the Jesuits in the 16th century, and the consequent introduction of Western science, China lost interest in her native algebra..."