André Weil: Quotes about mathematics

André Weil was French mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on mathematics.

André Weil: 22 quotes2 likes

“It is hard for you to appreciate that modern mathematics has become so extensive and so complex that it is essential, if mathematics is to stay as a whole and not become a pile of little bits of research, to provide a unification, which absorbs in some simple and general theories all the common substrata of the diverse branches if the science, suppressing what is not so useful and necessary, and leaving intact what is truly the specific detail of each big problem. This is the good one can achieve with axiomatics (and this is no small achievement). This is what Bourbaki is up to.”

André Weil

as translated by Martin H. Krieger "A 1940 letter of André Weil on analogy in mathematics." http://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf Notices of the AMS 52, no. 3 (2005) pp. 334–341, quote on p. 341

“About ancient mathematics (whether Greek or Mesopotamian) and medieval mathematics (Western or Oriental), the would-be historian must of necessity confine himself to the description of a comparatively small number of islands accidentally emerging from an ocean of ignorance, and to tenuous conjectural reconstructions of the submerged continents which at one time must have bridged the gaps between them.”

André Weil

Number Theory: An approach through history from Hammurapi to Legendre (Springer, 2006), p. 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=XSV0hDFj3loC&pg=PA3

“God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”

André Weil

As quoted in Mathematical Circles Adieu (Boston 1977) by H Eves

“Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results— he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone.”

André Weil

[Amir D. Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician, http://books.google.com/books?id=fRCH-at7wgYC&pg=PA53, 29 April 2009, Basic Books, 978-0-7867-3288-3, 54]
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