1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Carl Ludwig Siegel

Carl Ludwig Siegel Quotes

Carl Ludwig Siegel was a German mathematician specialising in analytic number theory. He is known for, amongst other things, his contributions to the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem in Diophantine approximation and the Siegel mass formula for quadratic forms. He was named as one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.André Weil, without hesitation, named Siegel as the greatest mathematician of the first half of the 20th century. Atle Selberg said of Siegel and his work:



He was in some ways, perhaps, the most impressive mathematician I have met. I would say, in a way, devastatingly so. The things that Siegel tended to do were usually things that seemed impossible. Also after they were done, they still seemed almost impossible. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. December 1896 – 4. April 1981
Carl Ludwig Siegel photo
Carl Ludwig Siegel: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Carl Ludwig Siegel Quotes

“I am afraid that mathematics will perish by the end of this century if the present trend for senseless abstractin — as I call it: theory of the empty set — cannot be blocked up.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel

in a 1964 letter to L. J. Mordell as quoted by [C. S. Yogananda, The Life and Times of Bourbaki, June 2015, Resonance, 556–559, http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/020/06/0556-0559] (quote from p. 558)

“Ours, according to Leibnitz, is the best of all possible worlds, and the laws of nature can therefore be described in terms of extremal principles. Thus, arising from corresponding variational problems, the differential equations of mechanics have invariance properties relative to certain groups of coordinate transformations.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel

[Lectures on Celestial Mechanics, https://books.google.com/books?id=mZtrCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1] (p. 1)

“One of the many importants ideas introduced by Minkowski into the study of convex bodies was that of gauge function. Roughly, the gauge function is the equation of a convex body. Minkowski showed that the gauge function could be defined in a purely geometric way and that it must have certain properties analogous to those possessed by the distance of a point from the origin. He also showed that conversely given any function possessing these properties, there exists a convex body with the given function as its gauge function.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel

[Lectures on the Geometry of Numbers, https://books.google.com/books?id=dyH4CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA6] (p. 6)

Similar authors

Otto Stern photo
Otto Stern 2
German physicist
Erich Maria Remarque photo
Erich Maria Remarque 63
German novelist
Ernst Ruska photo
Ernst Ruska 2
German physicist
Werner Heisenberg photo
Werner Heisenberg 42
German theoretical physicist
Ernst Jünger photo
Ernst Jünger 16
German writer
John Nash photo
John Nash 23
American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate
Hermann Hesse photo
Hermann Hesse 168
German writer
Herta Müller photo
Herta Müller 28
German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist
Max Planck photo
Max Planck 30
German theoretical physicist
Eugene Paul Wigner photo
Eugene Paul Wigner 6
mathematician and Nobel Prize-winning physicist