Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.
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Ch. 15 Science and MysticismArthur Stanley Eddington
» Arthur Stanley Eddington - all quotes »
I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where ? proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.
G. H. Hardy
A mathematician, then, will be defined in what follows as someone who has published the proof of at least one non-trivial theorem.
Jean Dieudonne
From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
James Jeans
“Dead trees enclosed the bodies of men and women, violently distorted and subjected to hideous and shameful tortures.” (Garden of Tortures)
Octave Mirbeau
Eddington, Arthur Stanley
Eddison, Eric Rucker
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