Evangelista Torricelli Quotes

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?

Plane geometry is sort of the key course where you learn about proving things and abstraction.

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture."

Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They'll tell you they don't need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they're like little children.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle a particular bottle out of a cylinder.

In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

Experience proves that anyone who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker to grasp difficult subjects than one who has not.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.