Mathematician

Quotes & Thinkers in Mathematician

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"Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."

163 quotes

🇦🇹Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy

analytic philosophy

1845–1925

"What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life."

178 quotes

🇬🇧Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy

1861–1947

"Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place."

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries."

"Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards."

"And Beasts that have Deliberation, must necessarily also have Will."

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

"True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it."

"We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption."

"Some blood transfusion from the East to the West is a must to save Western science from spiritual anaemia."

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

31 quotes

🇺🇸Charles Sanders Peirce

Mathematics

pragmatism

1839–1914

"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

"... bloße Erfahrung ist keine Wissenschaft."

"The false interpreters of nature declare that quicksilver is the common seed of every metal, not remembering that nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world."

"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."

"Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder."

"III. Thesis. A God working in Time. . Antithesis. A timeless, personal, omniscient, al-mighty, all-benevolent God ."

35 quotes

🇺🇸Buckminster Fuller

Philosophy

high-tech architecture

1895–1983

"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

"From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician."

"How many theorems in geometry which have seemed at first impracticable are in time successfully worked out!"

"National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir"

"Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?"

"Topology and number theory are my faves."

"Polish translations of letters written by Copernicus in Latin or German"

24 quotes

🇮🇱Natan Sharansky

Politics

Movement to Free Soviet Jewry

b. 1948

"The free world should not wait for dictatorial regimes to consent to reform."

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

28 quotes

🇬🇧Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Mathematics

1941–2014

"From the 3rd century onwards, orthodox Christianity, based on a Hebrew story and worshipping the Jew Jesus, also led many campaigns of anti-Semitism."

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

"A physical theory reputed to be satisfactory by the sectarians of one metaphysical school will be rejected by the partisans of another school."

"A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked in detail"

"The sales department isn't the whole company, but the whole company had better be the sales department."

"I had not only opportunity of seeing how different things have been made, but also manual work made me strong."

"I have also rendered the phonic molecular vibrations visible, when produced by the longitudinal oscillations of a column of air ..."

"In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose."

6 quotes

🇬🇧John Edensor Littlewood

Mathematics

1885–1977

"I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now."

"Number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower-lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!"

"Mathematics allows you to see the invisible."

"Dionysius Lardner . A Treatise on Hydrostatics and Pneumatics. Stimson and Clapp. With Benjamin Franklin Joslin."

"I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground."

2 quotes

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