24
votes
Accepted
Did Ronald Fisher ever say anything on varying the threshold of significance level?
Jerry Dallal collected some of Fisher's quotes from various works. And Fisher said too much, first setting the P=0.05 cutoff in 1925, then not following it himself, and, finally, openly advocating ...
- 80k
24
votes
Did Gauss really call Archimedes an idiot?
In Dunnington, G. W., Gray, J., & Dohse, F. E. (2004). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. MAA. p. 218 one finds the following:
Archimedes was the man of antiquity whom Gauss esteemed most ...
- 3,149
18
votes
Accepted
Did Newton say: "If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent"?
So far I have been unable to find substantially identical words in Newton's writings, and as usual, authors that use this quotation do not cite a source. The origin may be a remark of Newton's in ...
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15
votes
Accepted
Which physicist is this quote attributed to?
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1949), pp. 33-34:A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but ...
- 5,419
15
votes
Accepted
Some references for Vladimir Arnold's thesis "Mathematics is a part of physics"?
First, on the question in the narrow sense the answer is in the negative, I am afraid, although there are some other places where Arnold expresses his views on mathematics: An apologia for Applied ...
- 80k
14
votes
Accepted
Did Michel Rolle say that the calculus is "a collection of ingenious fallacies"?
"Did Rolle ever say/write any such thing (as that the calculus was 'a collection of ingenious fallacies')?"
Michel Rolle (France, 1652-1719) certainly did attack the mathematical basis of ...
- 5,125
13
votes
Did Einstein say "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them"?
I am afraid there is no original source. Wikipedia has talk pages where sourcing is discussed, and its editors did extensive searches on this one and its variants. It is listed under the heading ...
- 80k
12
votes
Accepted
Who said that math or statistics is not free from class interest?
The quote is from Lenin, in his instructions to Popov when discussing the project of organizing Soviet statistics in summer of 1918:"Statistics, as any other scientific discipline, poses problems ...
- 80k
11
votes
Source for Hilbert's famous quote "Mathematics in Göttingen? There really is none anymore"
In my grandfather's book, lately translated from German:
Recollections of a Jewish Mathematician in Germany, by Abraham A. Fraenkel, edited by Jiska Cohen-Mansfield, translated by Allison Brown.
...
- 119
11
votes
Source for this story about Einstein learning algebra from his uncle
The story is genuine. Isaacson retells it in his scientific biography Einstein: His Life and Universe based on recollections of his younger sister Maja, along with other evidence that dispels the ...
- 80k
11
votes
Accepted
Quotation about $\pi$ and the number of deaths
Almost. E P Wigner (1960), Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 1–14
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
THERE IS A story about two friends, who were ...
- 1,949
11
votes
Accepted
What is the mysterious expression mentioned by Hadamard that Riemann derived properties of zeta function from?
The mysterious expression, that Riemann did not "simplify enough to publish", is mentioned in his letter to Weierstrass published by Weber in 1876. It is reminiscent of Fermat's "...
- 80k
11
votes
Accepted
Source of a Poincaré quote: "Logic sometimes makes monsters..."
McTutor most likely took the passage from Kline's Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times, v.3, p.973, they reproduced his translation verbatim. Kline references Poincare's essay Dans la ...
- 80k
10
votes
Accepted
Who did say that anyone who discover a new particle should be fined instead of receiving a prize?
According to a slide deck I found, it was Willis Lamb. Quote from said deck:
In 1955, Willis Lamb started his Nobel Prize acceptance speech by
saying that “maybe physicists discovering a new ...
- 2,578
10
votes
Gauss on philosophers
The quote is not accurate but Gauss actually wrote something similar to Schumacher in the letter of 1 November 1844 cited here, where he complains about concepts and definitions given in math books by ...
- 4,400
10
votes
Accepted
What was Richard Courant's saying about mathematical research apart from applications?
There is river imagery in a passage from the preface (written by Courant) to Courant-Hilbert's Methods of Mathematical Physics, vol. 1, but the point of the metaphor is somewhat different. It is ...
- 80k
10
votes
Accepted
Poincaré's definition of mathematics (?)
The phrase appears in chapter 2 of Science and Method, L'avenir des Mathématiques, English translation, The Future of Mathematics. Poincare refers to the centrality of form over substance in ...
- 80k
10
votes
Accepted
Is there evidence that Gödel said "phoned with God"?
I have not been able to locate the passage in Rautenberg's book in which the episode is reported (EDIT: is in Chapter 6.4 "The Representability Theorem" on page 243), however a similar ...
- 4,400
9
votes
Accepted
Paul Erdos' quote "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems"
An annotated bibliography by Lagarias on the 3x+1 problem shows a couple mentions of papers by Erdős that touch on related topics, but seems to trace the quote as follows:
Richard K. Guy (1983a) Don’...
- 406
9
votes
Did Einstein really say: "If I were wrong, it would only take one."
“When I was doing Professor Albert Einstein’s bust he had many a jibe at the Nazi professors, one hundred of whom had condemned his theory of relativity in a book. ‘Were I wrong,’ he said, ’one ...
- 91
9
votes
What is the source of Hermann Weyl's remark about "near-sighted policemen" with respect to compact spaces?
The closest match I could find is in H. Weyl, "Harmonics on homogeneous manifolds." Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 35, No. 3, July 1934, pp. 486-499, as reproduced in K. ...
- 7,279
9
votes
Accepted
Did Kronecker's "ganzen Zahlen" refer to whole numbers as natural numbers or integers?
TL; DR: the "ganzen Zahlen" refers to positive integers. Gauss, Dedekind and Cantor were reifying new mathematical objects obtained by explicit or implicit procedures, and then forgetting ...
- 80k
8
votes
Checking a Gödel quote on Principia Mathematica
In responding to your question, I hope that I can convince you of the following two claims:
Gödel held that the formal system of the actual Principia was that of ramified type thoery (simple type ...
8
votes
Accepted
Source for Felix Klein quote about curves
Elementarmathematik vom höheren Standpunkte aus, Bd.2
Was eine Kurve ist, glaubt jeder Mensch zu wissen, bis er so viel
Mathematik gelernt hat, daß ihn die unzähligen möglichen Abnormitäten
...
- 2,462
8
votes
Accepted
Natura non facit saltus (nature does not make jumps), who said that?
The Latin quip was derived from Aristotle's History of Animals, where it is rather specific to the context of the "scale of life". Hence Linnaeus's and Darwin's references are more on point than more ...
- 80k
8
votes
Accepted
Number theory: a quote
"It has been estimated that, at the present stage of our knowledge, one could give a
200 semester course on commutative algebra and algebraic geometry without ever
repeating himself." These ...
- 218
8
votes
Accepted
Provenance of mathematics quote from Robert Musil, 1913
This quote is from Der mathematische Mensch (The mathematical man), which is a short essay by Robert Musil, published in 1913.
In this essay Musil makes some considerations about the role and the ...
- 1,318
8
votes
Did Einstein say the one-way speed-of-light is "not a fact of nature"?
A web search for "einstein" "speed of light" "not a fact of nature" only turns up M Slavov, "Time as an Empirical Concept in ...
- 408
7
votes
Who is the philosopher Feynman cites as saying that existence of science requires the same conditions to produce the same results?
Nobody in particular, it is what is called collective image in literature. Feynman's attitude towards philosophy is expressed by another of his quotes, "philosophy of science is about as useful to ...
- 80k
7
votes
Substantiating claimed Fourier quote about “an arbitrarily capricious graph”
You can find the quote (or something similar) in multiple places in the Théorie analytique de la chaleur, for example in
Chapter I,
paragraph (article) 14:
"L'examen de cette condition fait ...
- 4,400
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