Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)
Euclid alone has
looked on Beauty
bare.
Let all
who prate of Beauty
hold their peace,
And lay them prone
upon the earth and
cease
To ponder
on themselves, the
while they stare
At nothing,
intricately drawn
nowhere
In
shapes of shifting
lineage; let
geese
Gabble
and hiss, but heroes
seek release
From dusty bondage
into luminous
air.
O blinding
hour, O holy,
terrible day,
When first the
shaft into his
vision shone
Of
light anatomized!
Euclid alone
Has looked on
Beauty bare.
Fortunate they
Who, though once
only and then but
far away,
Have
heard her massive
sandal set on stone.
Mencken, H. L. (1880 - 1956)
Bridges would not be
safer if only people
who knew the proper
definition of a real
number were allowed
to design them.
Topological Theory
of Defects in Review
of Modern Physics
McShane, E. J.
There are in this world optimists who feel that any symbol that starts off with an integral sign must necessarily denote something that will have every property that they should like an integral to possess. This of course is quite annoying to us rigorous mathematicians; what is even more annoying is that by doing so they often come up with the right answer.
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, v. 69, p. 611, 1963.
McDuff, Dusa
Gel'fand amazed me
by talking of
mathematics as
though it were
poetry. He once said
about a long paper
bristling with
formulas that it
contained the vague
beginnings of an
idea which he could
only hint at and
which he had never
managed to bring out
more clearly. I had
always thought of
mathematics as being
much more
straightforward: a
formula is a
formula, and an
algebra is an
algebra, but
Gel'fand found
hedgehogs lurking in
the rows of his
spectral sequences!
Mathematical Notices
v. 38, no. 3, March
1991, pp. 185-7.
Mayer, Maria Goeppert (1906 -1972)
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
J. Dash, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, A Life of One's Own.
Matthias, Bernd T
If you see a formula in the Physical Review that extends over a quarter of a page, forget it. It's wrong. Nature isn't that complicated.
Maxwell, James Clerk (1813-1879)
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Scientific Papers 2, 244, October 1871.
Mathesis, Adrian
The greatest unsolved theorem in mathematics is why some people are better at it than others.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.
Mathesis, Adrian
If your new theorem can be stated with great simplicity, then there will exist a pathological exception.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.
Mathesis, Adrian
All great theorems were discovered after midnight.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.