William Mitchinson Hicks Quotes

United Kingdom, Mathematician
September 23, 1850 – August, 17, 1934.

William Mitchinson Hicks, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1873, and became a Fellow at the College.

While, on the one hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. These ultimate laws-in the domain of physical science at least-will be the dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ultimate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathematics.

William Mitchinson Hicks