Questions tagged [quote]
The quote tag has no usage guidance.
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Did Newton say: "If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent"?
I came across the above quote, and found it quite interesting. However, I struggled to find an actual source. Did Newton truly say this?
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Seeking Source of this Pythagorean Quote "Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons."
I've encountered the quote "Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons," which is frequently attributed to Pythagoras. My objective is to ascertain the ...
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Onsager on phase transitions
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman has Feynman ascribing to Onsager the following quote (during the International Conference of Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, in 1953):
"We should tell Feynman ...
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Attributed quote to Nikola Tesla
In many serious engineering and scientific publications including IEEE publications, we see a quote attributed to Nikola Tesla which goes like this
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, ...
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Source of a Poincaré quote: "Logic sometimes makes monsters..."
There's a quote by Poincare on the "new functions", such as continuous functions without derivatives, that were appearing during the second half of the 19th century. The fullest version I've ...
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Sylvester's Quote on Determinants
What does the following quote by Sylvester mean?
"A general algebraical determinant in its developed form may be likened to a mixture of liquids seemingly homogeneous, but which, being of ...
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Did Heisenberg say free will could arise from quantum probabilistic mechanics?
I see this view attributed to him a lot during Twitter debates but I never found the source for it
does anyone know if Heisenberg actually held this view/suggested it?
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Examples of flattering comments from a famous scientist concerning a young colleague
I want to know examples of very flattering comments from famous scientists or mathematicians concerning younger colleagues. Here's an example of what I have in mind (I shall provide more as an answer):...
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Provenance of mathematics quote from Robert Musil, 1913
The quote is as follows:
"Nur wenn man nicht auf den Nutzen nach aussen sieht, sondern in der Mathematik selbst auf das Verhältnis der unbenutzten Teile, bemerkt man das andere und eigentliche ...
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Source of a quote and a story
I read a story and a quote few years ago on a mathematical community in my country and today I just suddenly reminiscend of and want to know whether they are real or not and if it is the former case ...
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Poincaré's definition of mathematics (?)
Poincaré is said to have given this definition of mathematics:
It is the art of giving the same name to different objects. I can not believe this quote is from Poincaré.
Did Poincaré really say this? ...
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What does this quote by Paul Halmos mean?
I came across the following quote by the famous mathematician Paul Halmos:
A clever graduate student could teach Fourier something new, but surely no one claims that he could teach Archimedes to ...
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When did E. Hopf say "ergodic theory is statistics and statistics is measure theory"?
In the archived version of Kolmogorov's Foundations of the Theory of Probability, at the very end of the book, p. $84,$ few books have been listed, one being E. Hopf's Ergodentheorie, where it is ...
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What was the quote about known things being trivial and unknown things being impossible?
I am new to this portion of stack exchange and am not sure if this type of question is allowed, but after seeing this, I assume it is.
A while back, I remember reading a quote about math that said ...
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Did Kronecker's "ganzen Zahlen" refer to whole numbers as natural numbers or integers?
Maybe this is a question better for German language Stack Exchange, but in the quote attributed to Kronecker:
Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.
So "...
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Quote about the history of particle physics
I have a (very) vague remembrance of a quote about the history of particle physics, particularly (I think?) the development of the standard model. As I recall, it was about how it was a very exciting ...
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Poincaré's quote: "I thought a lot about them"
I have a vague memory of reading once that somebody (maybe a journalist) asked Poincaré how had he been capable of solving all those fantastically difficult problems that he had solved. The answer was ...
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Number theory: a quote
I remember reading a remark on number theory that went something like this: "there is plenty of material in this topic for an $n$ semester course without having to repeat oneself".
Have you ...
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Who proclaimed separation of science from philosophy?
Historically (since 2500 years ago), philosophy - "love of wisdom" in Greek - encompassed all intellectual endeavors, and natural philosophy was seen as its part. However, these days the ...
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Source of a Quote by M. Stone on Poincaré and Bourbaki
The quote in question is the following:
For Bourbaki, Poincaré was the devil incarnate. For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth.
The common reference for this quote ...
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What is the mysterious expression mentioned by Hadamard that Riemann derived properties of zeta function from?
In the Chapter 7 epigraph in Stein and Shakarchi's Complex Analysis, there is a quote, apparently from Hadamard in 1945, saying
He proved some important properties of that function, but enunciated ...
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What is the "legendary Chicago machine" Rosenfeld refers to in his 1963 paper *On quantization of fields*?
There's a famous paper by L. Rosenfeld (On quantization of fields. Nuclear Physics 40, 353–356 (1963). doi:10.1016/0029-5582(63)90279-7) in which he criticizes the theoretical arguments leading to the ...
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Source of a Poincaré quote from a Busemann paper
In his paper "The geometry of Finsler spaces" (available at https://projecteuclid.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-american-mathematical-society-new-series/volume-56/issue-1.P1/The-geometry-of-...
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Looking for reference for quote
In graduate school, I remember hearing or seeing the rough quote:
Good mathematicians know one branch of math. Great mathematicians
know two branches.
I'm sure I am somewhat misquoting it, but does ...
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Alleged quote by Habermas in original. "Science is the ideology of late capitalism." Where to find it?
M. Bunge in his book "Evaluating Philosophies" makes the following statement:
Scientism has been explicitly opposed by dogmatists and obscurantists of all stripes, such as the neoliberal ...
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Who said that math or statistics is not free from class interest?
I'm not 100% sure this is the right site for this question, but here it goes.
An already dead professor said in a lecture that Stalin (or perhaps another communist leader) wrote once something along ...
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What was Richard Courant's saying about mathematical research apart from applications?
I remember reading somewhere (perhaps in The Mathematical Experience) that Richard Courant wrote something to the effect that, without applications to guide the river of mathematical discovery, ...
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What did Maxwell mean by different types of people to whom science should be presented in different forms?
In my copy of Physics for Scientists and Engineers with Modern Physics (Volume 2) by Raymond Serway there is a quote given by James Clerk Maxwell at the start of Part IV.
For the sake of persons of [....
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Need quote from early 20th century about humanity probably never being able to control (manipulate, see?) a single quantum system
I remember having read a statement, I think by one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, that we will probably never be able to control (or manipulate or see or isolate...?) a single quantum ...
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What is the source of Donald Knuth's remark about naming programming languages?
(This question toes the line between belonging here and belonging on the Retrocomputing Stack Exchange.)
Here is the quote; sometimes the first sentence is omitted:
The most important thing in a ...
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Authenticity of Gauss's Quote "If others reflect on mathematical truths as deeply as I..."
in Gauss's Section in 'The World of Mathematics' Gauss is said to have declared that :
If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my ...
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A quote attributed to Gauss
A version of this question first appeared in MathOverflow but did not receive satisfactory answers.
This quote is often attributed to Gauss:
Die Mathematik ist die Königin der Wissenschaften, und ...
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Source of a quote typically attributed to Proclus Lycaeus
The quote in question goes something like this:
This, therefore, is mathematics: she reminds you of the invisible form of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and ...
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What is the source of Hermann Weyl's remark about "near-sighted policemen" with respect to compact spaces?
Hermann Weyl is widely reported as making the following observation about a compact space:
"If a city is compact, it can be guarded by a finite number of arbitrarily near-sighted policemen."
...
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Quotation reference: "functions which can be evaluated under 1 sec are as good as analytically available"
I have a vague memory of a (possibly-apocryphal) quote by a physicist (I remember it as being Giorgio Parisi, which could be wrong), saying something to the effect of
"any function which can be ...
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Some references for Vladimir Arnold's thesis "Mathematics is a part of physics"?
The mathematician Vladimir Arnold claimed that mathematics is a part of physics.
I am aware of Arnold's On Teaching Mathematics where he stated this view, but is there any piece of writing where ...
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What is the source of a quotation by Niels Bohr?
The quote is:
When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer,
'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical
description. It is wrong to think that the ...
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Einstein: 'SR is a theory of invariants, not relativity' -- source?
It is occasionally remarked that Einstein was unhappy that SR became referred to as a ‘theory of relativity’, when in his eyes it was, much more importantly, a theory of invariants (Invariantentheorie)...
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Where is this statement of Bourbaki's Dieudonné from and what does it mean?
In a few places, such as this web page, I have read the following statement about Jean Dieudonné, who was a founding member of the French "secret society" of mathematicians, Nicolas Bourbaki:...
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Did John von Neumann hate pure mathematics that became too abstract?
John von Neumann wrote the following in his essay The Mathematician:
As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only ...
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Exact quote (and source of) by John Conway regarding the action/origin of the Monster?
I vaguely remember reading a quote/listening to a statement by John Conway which I can paraphrase as follows:
"I do not know what object the Monster group acts on, but it seems to exist because ...
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Quote from ancient scholar: that a leader cannot be neutral, he must chose a side [closed]
An ancient scholar said a leader cannot be neutral, that he must chose a side or he will be viewed as an enemy by both sides.
I am trying to find who said/wrote that. Anyone know?
Thanks.
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Natura non facit saltus (nature does not make jumps), who said that?
The sentence is Latin for nature doesn't make jumps. It refers to the fact that, in most physical processes, quantities vary continuously.
The principle was used by Leibniz, Kant and Darwin among ...
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Quotation about $\pi$ and the number of deaths
I read more than once a story which took place, if memory serves me well, in England, in the XIXth century. A statistician (or a mathematician) was making computations about life expectancy (or ...
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What was Copernicus trying to mean with 'Mathematics is Written for Mathematicians'?
I'm interested in really understanding what Copernicus was getting at with the quote 'mathematics is written for mathematicians'.
He clearly isn't referring to the rigorous nature of mathematical ...
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Gauss on philosophers
Carl Friedrich Gauss said:
When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.
On one occasion I read that supposedly ...
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Substantiating claimed Fourier quote about “an arbitrarily capricious graph”
The following quote (in English) is fairly widely attributed to Fourier, but I can't substantiate it.
An arbitrary function, continuous or with discontinuities, defined in a finite interval by an ...
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Did Darwin say that the human menstrual cycle length was influenced by the tides?
According to this article from the BBC's Science Focus
Charles Darwin thought that the 28-day human menstrual cycle was
evidence that our ancestors lived on the seashore and needed to
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Are these Newton's quotes apocryphal?
I have stumbled upon the following alleged Newton's quotes, but I could not find them in any of their works.
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
No sciences are better attested ...
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Reference Request: Comment about Contradictions Proof Method Related to John G. Thompson
I read in a PDF document where the author made a comment that it is “dangerous” to use indirect proof method/contradiction proof method (as far as I can remember, and of course I am paraphrasing) as ...
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