David Hilbert: Doing

David Hilbert was German prominent mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

David Hilbert: 60 quotes19 likes

“I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the Senate is not a bath-house.”

Hilbert-Courant (1984) by Constance Reid, p. 143

“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”

Quoted in Constance Reid, "Hilbert" (1970)

“If we do not succeed in solving a mathematical problem, the reason frequently consists in our failure to recognize the more general standpoint from which the problem before us appears only as a single link in a chain of related problems. After finding this standpoint, not only is this problem frequently more accessible to our investigation, but at the same time we come into possession of a method which is applicable also to related problems.”

David Hilbert Mathematical Problems

Mathematical Problems (1900)

“Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs.”

Quoted in Hilbert's Die Grundlagen der Mathematik (1927)