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Carl Friedrich Gauss: 100 quotes7 likes

“There is in this world a joy of the intellect, which finds satisfaction in science, and a joy of the heart, which manifests itself above all in the aid men give one another against the troubles and trials of life. But for the Supreme Being to have created existences, and stationed them in various spheres in order to taste these joys for some 80 or 90 years — that were surely a miserable plan…. Whether the soul were to live for 80 years or for 80 million years, if it were doomed in the end to perish, such an existence would only be a respite. In the end it would drop out of being. We are thus impelled to the conclusion to which so many things point, although they do not amount to a coercive scientific proof, that besides this material world there exists another purely spiritual order of things, with activities as various, as the present, and that this world of spirit we shall one day inherit.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911. "Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century" https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/48/mode/2up, Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 48-49

“I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect... Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Solid Shape (1990) by Jan J. Koenderink

“You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Calculus Gems (1992) by George F. Simmons

“The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted by Robert Chambers, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Apple," The Book of Days (1832) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=K0UJAAAAIAAJ, p. 757.

“Believe me,… the bitterness of life, or at least of mine, which runs through it like a strand of red, and becomes less and less endurable as I grow older, is not compensated in the hundredth part by the joy of life. I will freely admit that these burdens, which to me have been so grievous, would have been lighter to many another; but our temperament is part of ourselves, given to us by the Creator with our very existence, and we have very little power to change it. I find, on the other hand, in this very consciousness of the vanity of life, which nearly all men must confess to as they draw near the end, my strongest assurance of the approach of a more beautiful metamorphosis. In this, my dear friend, let us find comfort, and endeavour to call up calmness to bear life out to the end.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

“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 ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

In a letter to Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (14 May 1826), defending Chevalier d'Angos against presumption of guilt (by Johann Franz Encke and others), of having falsely claimed to have discovered a comet in 1784; as quoted in Calculus Gems (1992) by George F. Simmons

“To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work … coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Letter to Farkas Bolyai, on his son János Bolyai's 1832 publishings on non-Euclidean geometry.

“Yes! The world would be nonsense, the whole creation an absurdity without immortality.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 357

“Finally, two days ago, I succeeded— not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Mathematical Circles Squared (1972) by Howard W. Eves

“In such apparent accidents which finally produce such a decisive influence on one s whole life, one is inclined to recognize the tools of a higher hand. The great enigma of life never becomes clear to us here below.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

In a letter dated April 25, 1825. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

“There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

“In general the position as regards all such new calculi is this - That one cannot accomplish by them anything that could not be accomplished without them. However, the advantage is, that, provided such a calculus corresponds to the inmost nature of frequent needs, anyone who masters it thoroughly is able - without the unconscious inspiration of genius which no one can command - to solve the respective problems, yea to solve them mechanically in complicated cases in which, without such aid, even genius becomes powerless. Such is the case with the invention of general algebra, with the differential calculus, and in a more limited region with Lagrange's calculus of variations, with my calculus of congruences, and with Mobius's calculus. Such conceptions unite, as it were, into an organic whole countless problems which otherwise would remain isolated and require for their separate solution more or less application of inventive genius.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Gauss, Werke, Bd. 8, page 298
As quoted in Memorabilia Mathematica (or The Philomath's Quotation-Book) (1914) by Robert Edouard Moritz, quotation #1215
As quoted in The First Systems of Weighted Differential and Integral Calculus (1980) by Jane Grossman, Michael Grossman, and Robert Katz, page ii

“You say that faith is a gift; this is perhaps the most correct thing that can be said about it.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.

“The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. … Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss book Disquisitiones Arithmeticae

Problema, numeros primos a compositis dignoscendi, hosque in factores suos primos resolvendi, ad gravissima ac utilissima totius arithmeticae pertinere, et geometrarum tum veterum tum recentiorum industriam ac sagacitatem occupavisse, tam notum est, ut de hac re copiose loqui superfluum foret. … [P]raetereaque scientiae dignitas requirere videtur, ut omnia subsidia ad solutionem problematis tam elegantis ac celebris sedulo excolantur.
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801): Article 329

“I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance… The writer is a very young Austrian officer, the son of one of my early friends, with whom I often discussed the subject in 1798, although my ideas were at that time far removed from the development and maturity which they have received through the original reflections of this young man. I consider the young geometer J. Bolyai a genius of the first rank.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Letter to Gerling (1832)

“The function just found cannot, it is true, express rigorously the probabilities of the errors: for since the possible errors are in all cases confined within certain limits, the probability of errors exceeding those limits ought always to be zero, while our formula always gives some value. However, this defect, which every analytical function must, from its nature, labor under, is of no importance in practice, because the value of our function decreases so rapidly… that it can safely be considered as vanishing. Besides, the nature of the subject never admits of assigning with absolute rigor the limits of error.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections http://books.google.com/books?id=cspWAAAAMAAJ& (1857)

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

The Mind and the Eye (1954) by A. Arber

“It is beyond doubt that the happiness which love can bestow on its chosen souls is the highest that can fall to mortal's lot. But when I imagine myself in the place of the man who, after twenty happy years, now in one moment loses his all, I am moved almost to say that he is the wretchedest of mortals, and that it is better never to have known such happy days. So it is on this miserable earth: 'the purest joy finds its grave in the abyss of time.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

What are we without the hope of a better future? <br class="br">As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911. "Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century" https://archive.org/stream/christianitylead00kneluoft#page/44/mode/2up, Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 44-45

“One is forced to the view, for which there is so much evidence even though without rigorous scientific basis, that besides this material world another, second, purely spiritual world order exists, with just as many diversities as that in which we live-—we are to participate in it.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 349

“Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss

As quoted in Gauss zum Gedächtniss (1856) by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen; Variants: Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.
Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. [Die Mathematik ist die Königin der Wissenschaften und die Zahlentheorie ist die Königin der Mathematik.]