Otto Toeplitz - Quotes

Quotes

Here is how Gottfried Köthe, who was Toeplitz's assistant in Bonn, described their collaboration:

"Otto liked to take walks and talk about scientific questions. I in fact needed a piece of paper and pencil to write everything down. Toeplitz convinced me that the great outline of research comes to light best in dialog. In his protocols of mutual meetings, sometimes it is marked that the results as drafted were found at a walk along the Rhine river ...As we advanced with our joint work, naturally, new questions arose, and we became more daring, setting ourselves higher goals."

In his own words:

"...Mathematics and mathematical thinking are not only part of a special science, but are also closely connected with our general culture and its historic development of mathematical thinking, a bridge to the so called Arts and Sciences and the seemingly so non-historic exact sciences can be found...Our main purpose is to help build such a bridge. Not for the sake of history but for the genesis of problems, facts and proofs, for the sake of the decisive turning points of that genesis...By going back to the roots of these conceptions, back through the dust of times past, the scars of long use would disappear and they would be reborn to us as creatures full of life." (Toeplitz, 1926).