Quotes About Gauss

Progetti, sbuffò Gauss. Chiacchiere, piani, intrighi. Tiritere con dieci prìncipi e cento accademie prima di poter appoggiare un barometro da qualche parte. Quella non era scienza. Ah, esclamò Humboldt, e cos'era allora la scienza? Gauss tirò dalla pipa. Un uomo da solo seduto alla sua scrivania. Un foglio di carta, tutt'al più un cannocchiale davanti alla finestra con un cielo terso. E quest'uomo che non si arrende fino a quando non capisce. Forse quella era scienza.

Alla luce di una lampada a olio Gauss passava ore e ore a osservare il pendolo. Nella stanza non penetravano suoni. Così come il viaggio sul pallone con Pilâtre gli aveva mostrato cosa fosse lo spazio, adesso in qualche modo sarebbe riuscito a comprendere l'inquietudine insita nel cuore della natura. Non era necessario arrampicarsi sulle montagne o impelagarsi nella giungla. Chi osservava quell'ago guardava l'interno del mondo.

[Gauss calculated the elements of the planet Ceres] and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.'

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 mathematical giant [Gauss], who from his lofty heights embraces in one view the stars and the abysses …

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

The importance of C.F. Gauss for the development of modern physical theory and especially for the mathematical fundament of the theory of relativity is overwhelming indeed; also his achievement of the system of absolute measurement in the field of electromagnetism. In my opinion it is impossible to achieve a coherent objective picture of the world on the basis of concepts which are taken more or less from inner psychological experience.

He (Gauss) lives everywhere in mathematics

Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss." And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.

On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss] [Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.

communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers.

I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect.

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.

The second basic function of algebra is to convert expressions into more useful ones. Gauss's