Top Eric Temple Bell Quotes

Eric Temple Bell Biography

Eric Temple Bell (February 7, 1883 – December 21, 1960) was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.

Read about Eric Temple Bell in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Eric Temple Bell Quotes

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.

Abstractness, Beauty, Glory, Math, Reproach, Spring

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

Come, Comfort, Fool, Greater, Time

Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.

Fashion, Kings, Stupid, King, Ruler

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.

Among, Class, Order, Ordinary

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Dangerous, Knowledge, Math, Mathematics, Obvious, Science

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

Individualism, Life, Longer, Mathematics, Practical

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

Geometry, Ingenuity, Road, Royal, Science

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

Basis, Creative, Importance, Innovator, Irreverence, Work

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

Comparative, Crystallized, Groups, Simplicity, Statistics

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.

Doubt, Math, Pretty, Quest, Silly, Vice

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.

Apes, Happened, Math, Mathematics, Race

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

Absolute, Absolute Truth, Eternal, Pretension, Science

[As a young teenager] Galois read [Legendre's] geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Boys, Cover, Pirate, Read, Science, Teenager

The Handmaiden of the Sciences.

Handmaiden, Math, Mathematical, Mathematics, Sciences

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.

Basis, Beliefs, Exposed, Pieces, Understanding, Views

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.

Men, Vision, Lasts, Mathematics, Exposition, Poincaré

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.

Eye, Inexpert, Mean, Scribbles, Symbols, Writing

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.

Elementary, Logic, Mathematics, Opponents, Terms

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

Hated, Machinery, Machines, Math, Understanding, Understood

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.

Challenges, Clifford, Geometry, Impact, Science, Thought

››

Eric Temple Bell Biography

Contact Us

About us