Top 46 Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

#1. I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #33651
#2. 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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #37076
#3. Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #38191
#4. Response, when asked how he came upon his theorems.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #38625
#5. To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work ... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #57519
#6. To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #64463
#7. A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. 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. []

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #263111
#8. God does arithmetic.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #290567
#9. I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #330533
#10. The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #361462
#11. It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #393313
#12. If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #411190
#13. Finally, two days ago, I succeeded - not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #510542
#14. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #544330
#15. I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ... , which is never permissible in mathematics.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #603791
#16. It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not the possession of but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #686785
#17. {In a letter to his friend Rudolf Wagner}

I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #723165
#18. Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #763086
#19. There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #790759
#20. Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #791357
#21. 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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #826526
#22. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...

{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #848394
#23. Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #866200
#24. Mathematics is the queen of the sciences

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #868422
#25. I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #901488
#26. Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #965806
#27. The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1057439
#28. I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1088067
#29. You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1152774
#30. It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1175824
#31. When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1179436
#32. Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1214854
#33. Ask her to wait a moment I am almost done.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1231381
#34. You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1252092
#35. His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1258404
#36. The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1275405
#37. There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1365205
#38. Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1424532
#39. In mathematics there are no true controversies.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1427525
#40. The higher arithmetic presents us with an inexhaustible store of interesting truths - of truths, too, which are not isolated, but stand in a close internal connection, and between which, as our knowledge increases, we are continually discovering new and sometimes wholly unexpected ties.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1437931
#41. No contradictions will arise as long as Finite Man does not mistake the infinite for something fixed, as long as he is not led by an acquired habit of mind to regard the infinite as something bounded.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1456308
#42. As our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1682953
#43. Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1742625
#44. 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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1764706
#45. Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1764864
#46. I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes #1800569

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