Mathematicians Quotes
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Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.
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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.
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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."
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Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.
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Mathematicians tend to prefer a worst-case analysis, a kind of paranoia that is especially understandable if you live in Israel!
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It is really this “mathematical mindset” that seems to be most useful to those who are not trained to think as mathematicians.
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Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.
