Quotes About Poincare

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

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.

Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.

The question: 'is the Euclidean geometry true?' has no significance for Poincaré, for these is no such thing as one geometry being more true than another.

There are only two perfectly useless things in the world," he quipped. "One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!

Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.

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.

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law.

Los hallazgos de Popper y de Poincaré limitan nuestra capacidad para ver en el futuro, haciendo de éste un reflejo muy complicado del pasado, si es que existe tal reflejo.

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law.

The other reason mathematicians were blind to chaos was that they had no computers, and were left with the kind of vague description that Poincaré gave, which other mathematicians failed to understand.

Poincaré, unusually for his time and class, was a feminist and a strong supporter of animal rights, refusing, for example, to join the customary hunting parties at the presidential country estate.

It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.