Quotes from Eric Temple Bell

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

Had Poincaré been as strong in practical science as he was in theoretical he might have made a fourth with the incomparable three, Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss.

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

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré had, and none in his superior in the gift of clear exposition.

As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre ]'s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.

Asked some years later how he (Abel) had managed to forge ahead so rapidly to the front rank he replied, "By studying the masters, not their pupils"- a prescription some popular writers of textbooks might do well to mention in their prefaces as an antidote to the poisonous mediocrity of their uninspired pedagogics.

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 ( Hermite , 1822-1901) 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.

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Although he was a limited mathematician with no pretensions to scientific greatness, Crelle was a broadminded man, in fact a great man.

Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

As Whitehead has observed, "No Roman lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram.

Commenting on the return of Descartes' remains to his native France, Jacobi remarks that "It is often more convenient to possess the ashes of great men than to possess the men themselves during their lifetime.

The mathematics of probability enters when we seek a method for enumerating possible cases without actually counting them off

Today it is given in the textbooks as an example which young students dispose of in twenty minutes or less. Yet it held Newton up for twenty years. He finally solved it, of course

EULER CALCULATED WITHOUT APPARENT EFFORT, as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind" (as Arago said), is not an exaggeration of the unequalled mathematical facility of Leonard Euler (1707-1783)

Replying two weeks later he states his opinion of Fermat's Last Theorem. "I am very much obliged for your news concerning the Paris prize. But I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

He (Gauss) lives everywhere in mathematics

A rational mind is sometimes the queerest mixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.