Top 65 Gauss's Quotes
#1. Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.
William Poundstone
#2. There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#3. Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#4. He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.
{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss}
Niels Henrik Abel
#6. His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#7. 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
#9. Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss." And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.
Jordan Ellenberg
#11. Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!
Rene Dubos
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss.
Ian Stewart
#15. You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#16. [Gauss calculated the elements of the planet Ceres] and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.'
W. W. Rouse Ball
#17. I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#18. Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#20. 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
#21. Communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers.
Norbert Wiener
#22. 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
#23. Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.
Albert Einstein
#24. The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.
John Von Neumann
#25. The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.
Felix Klein
#26. The mathematical giant [Gauss], who from his lofty heights embraces in one view the stars and the abysses ...
Farkas Bolyai
#27. 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
#28. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.
Steven Levy
#29. For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.
W. W. Rouse Ball
#30. Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round.
James S.A. Corey
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class.
G.H. Hardy
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.
James R Newman
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#48. 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
#49. If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#50. The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#51. 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
#52. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#53. Outstanding examples of genius - a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss - are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.
Fred Hoyle
#54. I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ... , which is never permissible in mathematics.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#55. 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
#56. {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
#58. 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
#59. Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#60. 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
#61. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...
{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.
Ludwig Boltzmann
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