"If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science."
- Henri Poincaré
"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 i..."
"The philosophers make still another objection: "What you gain in rigour," they say, "you lose in objectivity. You can rise toward your logical ideal only by cutting the bonds which attach you to reali..."
"Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of mee..."
"Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one u..."
"Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclip..."
"Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics."
"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."
"Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because,..."
- Jules Henri Poincaré