Quotes
Weyl's comment, although half a joke, sums up his personality:
- My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
- The question for the ultimate foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics remains open; we do not know in which direction it will find its final solution nor even whether a final objective answer can be expected at all. "Mathematizing" may well be a creative activity of man, like language or music, of primary originality, whose historical decisions defy complete objective rationalization.
- —Gesammelte Abhandlungen
- The problems of mathematics are not problems in a vacuum....
- vicious circle, which has crept into analysis through the foggy nature of the usual set and function concepts, is not a minor, easily avoided form of error in analysis.
- In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain. Weyl (1939b, p.500)
Read more about this topic: Hermann Weyl
Famous quotes containing the word quotes:
“Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. It’s exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. “I ain’t what I ought to be. I ain’t what I’m going to be, but I’m not what I was.””
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)