Henry John Stephen Smith quotes
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“Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone.”
-- Henry John Stephen SmithSource : Quoted in Alexander Macfarlane, Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (1916). "Pure mathematics; may it never be of use to any man!" is cited as the toast of the Mathematical Society of England in Science, 10 Dec. 1886.
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“It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.”
-- Henry John Stephen Smith -
“For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature.”
-- Henry John Stephen SmithSource : Henry John Stephen Smith (1894). “Collected Mathematical Papers; Edited by J. W. L. Glaisher ... with a Mathematical Introduction by the Editor, Biographical Sketchesand a Portrait ...”
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“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration...”
-- Henry John Stephen SmithSource : Henry John Stephen Smith (1965). “Collected Mathematical Papers”, p.74, American Mathematical Soc.
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“Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe.”
-- Henry John Stephen Smith
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“The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.”
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“One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.”
Source : Alexandre Dumas (2016). “My Memoirs (1802 to 1833)”, p.1444, Library of Alexandria
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“Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”
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“Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.”
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“I'm not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.”
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