Eric Temple Bell Quotes

#1. Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by
themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for
ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit.

Eric Temple Bell

#2. The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

Eric Temple Bell

#3. Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Eric Temple Bell

#4. Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell

#5. This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell

#6. Pick the assumptions to pieces till the stuff they are made of is exposed to plain view - this is the cardinal rule for understanding the basis of our beliefs.

Eric Temple Bell

#7. Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

Eric Temple Bell

#8. [As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]'s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Eric Temple Bell

#9. If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

Eric Temple Bell

#10. The hippopotamus is said to have a tender heart by those who have eaten that delicacy baked, so a thick skin is not necessarily a reliable index to what is inside the man.

Eric Temple Bell

#11. The Handmaiden of the Sciences.

Eric Temple Bell

#12. If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

Eric Temple Bell

#13. Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

Eric Temple Bell

#14. The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

Eric Temple Bell

#15. Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

Eric Temple Bell