Eric Temple Bell quotes

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future. (Eric Temple Bell)
'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
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. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so also can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. (Eric Temple Bell)
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. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
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. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Objections... inspired Kronecker and others to attack Weierstrass' "sequential" definition of irrationals. Nevertheless, right or wrong, Weierstrass and his school made the theory work. The most useful results they obtained have not yet been questioned, at least on the ground of their great utility in mathematical analysis and its implications, by any competent judge in his right mind. This does not mean that objections cannot be well taken: it merely calls attention to the fact that in mathematics, as in everything else, this earth is not yet to be confused with the Kingdom of Heaven, that perfection is a chimaera, and that, in the words of Crelle, we can only hope for closer and closer approximations to mathematical truth-whatever that may be, if anything-precisely as in the Weierstrassian theory of convergent sequences of rationals defining irrationals. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
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. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
The so-called obvious was repeatedly scrutinized from every angle and was frequently found to be not obvious but false. "Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences. View quote
Eric Temple Bell