Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science, New York, 1951, p 164.
Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles., Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.
Banville, John
Throughout the 1960s
and 1970s devoted
Beckett readers
greeted each
successively shorter
volume from the
master with a
mixture of awe and
apprehensiveness; it
was like watching a
great mathematician
wielding an
infinitesimal
calculus, his
equations
approaching nearer
and still nearer to
the null point.
Quoted in a review
of Samuel Beckett's
Nohow On: Ill Seen
Ill Said, Worstward
Ho, in The New York
Review of Books,
August 13, 1992.
Balzac, Honore de (1799 - 1850)
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
Bagehot, Walter
Life is a school of
probability.
Quoted in J. R.
Newman (ed.), The
World of
Mathematics,
Simon and Schuster,
New York, 1956, p.
1360.
Baker, H. F.
[On the concept of
group:]
...
what a wealth, what
a grandeur of
thought may spring
from what slight
beginnings.
Florian Cajori, A
History of
Mathematics, New
York, 1919, p. 283.
Bacon, Roger
In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to put itself into all postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended.
John Fauvel and Jeremy Gray (eds.) A History of Mathematics: A Reader, Sheridan House, 1987.
Bacon, Roger
For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Opus Majus part 4 Distinctia Prima cap 1, 1267.
Babbage, Charles (1792-1871)
I wish to God these
calculations had
been executed by
steam.
In H. Eves, In
Mathematical
Circles, Boston:
Prindle, Weber and
Schmidt, 1969.