Quotes - Math and Science

 

"Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"

- Gian-Carlo Rota, "Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught", 1997 

 

“Good, He did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.” 

- David Hilbert, after learning that a student in his class had
dropped the subject in order to become a poet.

(David Darling, The Universal Book of Mathematics)  

 

"How can you do physics and poetry at the same time? The aim of science is to make difficult things understand able in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." 

- Dirac once said to Oppenheimer

(Helge Kragh, "Dirac: A Scientific Biography")  

  

"A good building should not show its scaffolding when completed."

"No self-respecting architect leaves the scaffolding in place after completing his building."

- Gauss  

 

“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.” 

- Freeman Dyson told Newsweek in 2002 

 

"If I had to choose one book to take to a desert island, I would take Zygmund’s Trigonometric Series if I thought I might be rescued, but Hardy and Wright’s Number Theory if I knew that I was never coming back." 

 - T.W.  Körner, Foreword to A Course of Pure Mathematics, 2008

  

"... true knowledge can only be acquired piecemeal, by the patient interrogation of nature."

- Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity

"The first time you go through the subject, you do not understand it at all. The second time, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time, you know that you do not understand it, but you are so used to the subject that it does not bother you anymore."

- Arnold Sommerfeld, about thermodynamics

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

- Ernest Rutherford

"those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

"Research is when you don't know what you're doing."

- ??? 

In real estate, it is location, location, location.  In mathematics, it is notation, notation, notation.

- ????

 

... where there is no confusion there is no prestige.

-Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult