Richard Courant Quotes

#1. 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.

Richard Courant

#2. Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

Richard Courant

#3. Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.

Richard Courant

#4. For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

Richard Courant

#5. Euler - The unsurpassed master of analytic invention.

Richard Courant

#6. It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

Richard Courant