Henry John Stephen Smith (1826 – 1883)
Mathematician remembered for his work in elementary divisors, quadratic forms, matrix theory, and number theory.
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I do not know what Henry Smith may be at the subjects of which he professes to know something; but I never go to him about a matter of scholarship, in a line where he professes to know nothing without learning more from him than I can get from any one else.
If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration...
For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature.
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