Best 30 quotes of Eric Temple Bell on MyQuotes

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.

A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.

Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Had Poincaré been as strong in practical science as he was in theoretical he might have made a fourth with the incomparable three, Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss.

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

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 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.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Pick the assumptions to pieces till the stuff they are made of is exposed to plain view - this is the cardinal rule for understanding the basis of our beliefs.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

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.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

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.

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.

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.

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.