#thematic

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is! ↗

— Johnny Ball

#difficult #elegance #emphasise #how #mathematics

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#art #creative #feeling #fitness #generality

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#experience #game #indeed #making #marks

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#immortality #itself #marks #mathematics #off

Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#brief #dozen #fifty #half #indeed

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

— E. T. Bell

#also #becomes #lives #longer #mathematics

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation. ↗

— Marquis De Custine

#circumstances #complicated #human #human society #mathematical

The mathematics is not there till we put it there. ↗

— Arthur Eddington

#put #till

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#human #human thought #ladder #mathematician #reached

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible. ↗

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

#demanded #doubt #equal #every #half