Henri Poincare Quotes About Mathematics

Quotes about: Mathematics

• The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.

  Henri Poincare

  Creativity, Math, Mind

• It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Intuition, Logic

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.746, Modern Library

• Mathematicians are born, not made.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Born, Made

• Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

  Henri Poincare

  Life, Math, Abstract

• Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.... The two propositions: "The earth turns round" and "it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round" have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other.

  Henri Poincare

  Moving, Math, Two

• Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

  Henri Poincare

  Art, Science, Math

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.622, Modern Library

• Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
  [As opposed to the quotation: Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing].

  Henri Poincare

  Art, Math, Names

• One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

  Henri Poincare

  Mathematics, Geometry, Convenient

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.85, Modern Library

• It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.

  Henri Poincare

  Simple, Chance, Mathematics

  "Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888 - 1889". Preface to the book by Henri Poincare, 1892.

• Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Night, Thinking

• Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Disease, Generations

• Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means. The geometer might be replaced by the "logic piano" imagined by Stanley Jevons; or, if you choose, a machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

  Henri Poincare

  Mean, Math, Piano

• The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law. They reveal the kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.

  Henri Poincare

  Leadership, Math, Law

• How is error possible in mathematics?

  Henri Poincare

  Errors, Mathematics, Mathematical

• A first fact should surprise us, or rather would surprise us if we were not used to it. How does it happen there are people who do not understand mathematics? If mathematics invokes only the rules of logic, such as are accepted by all normal minds...how does it come about that so many persons are here refractory?

  Henri Poincare

  People, Mind, Ontology

• . . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Mind, World

• One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

  Henri Poincare

  Desire, Development, Remember

• All of mathematics is a tale about groups.

  Henri Poincare

  Groups, Mathematics, Tales

• How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ... and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Skeletons, Understanding

• Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.

  Henri Poincare

  Nature, Philosophical, Science

• So is not mathematical analysis then not just a vain game of the mind? To the physicist it can only give a convenient language; but isn't that a mediocre service, which after all we could have done without; and, it is not even to be feared that this artificial language be a veil, interposed between reality and the physicist's eye? Far from that, without this language most of the initimate analogies of things would forever have remained unknown to us; and we would never have had knowledge of the internal harmony of the world, which is, as we shall see, the only true objective reality.

  Henri Poincare

  Eye, Science, Reality

  "Statistical Mechanics of Disordered Systems: A Mathematical Perspective". Book by Anton Bovier, p. 3, 2006.

• A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.

  Henri Poincare

  Nature, Work, Math

  "Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse". Book by Tobias Dantzig, p. 8, 1954.

• For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Ideas, Long

• If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, History, Wish

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