Ferdinand Eisenstein Quotes

Ferdinand Eisenstein: 2 quotes0 likes

“I grew accustomed to delve more deeply into their relationships and to grasp whole theories as a single entity. That is how I conceived the idea of mathematical beauty…”

Ferdinand Eisenstein

Curriculum Vitae (1843)
Context: What attracted me so strongly and exclusively to mathematics, apart from the actual content, was particularly the specific nature of the mental processes by which mathematical concepts are handled. This way of deducing and discovering new truths from old ones, and the extraordinary clarity and self-evidence of the theorems, the ingeniousness of the ideas... had an irresistible fascination for me. Beginning from the individual theorems, I grew accustomed to delve more deeply into their relationships and to grasp whole theories as a single entity. That is how I conceived the idea of mathematical beauty...

“As a boy of six I could understand the proof of a mathematical theorem more readily than that meat had to be cut with one's knife, not one's fork.”

Ferdinand Eisenstein

Curriculum Vitae - an autobiographical statement written when Eisenstein was 20, often referred to as his "Autobiography" (1843)