mathematical contributions Quotes

We don't have parades for mathematicians, we have parades for astronauts. You don't think about all the thousands of people who worked on that capsule and crunched the numbers and were integral in getting that into space.

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

Had Mittag-Leffler had his way, I should have to wait until the year 1984, which to me seemed too great a demand!

Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for 500 years.

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.