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Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

In J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

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Loci: Convergence

Mathematical Quotations

Our library of quotations is organized alphabetically by surname of the author.

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Balzac, Honore de (1799 - 1850)

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.


Banville, John

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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.


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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.


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.


Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)

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.


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