George Frederick James Temple: Quotes about science

George Frederick James Temple was British mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on science.
George Frederick James Temple: 42 quotes1 like

“There is the definition [of mathematics], boldly proposed by Pierce that 'Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions', and more explicitly formulated by Russel that 'Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form "p implies q"… it was… the purpose of Russell's treatise to provide a complete, exact and convincing justification of this definition… instead, he and Whitehead collaborated to give a magisterial account of the Principia Mathematica.”

George Frederick James Temple

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

“Mathematical activity has taken the forms of a science, a philosophy and an art.”

George Frederick James Temple

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

“As a science mathematics has been adapted to the description of natural phenomena, and the great practitioners in this field… have never concerned themselves with the logical foundations of mathematics, but have boldly taken a pragmatic view of mathematics as an intellectual machine which works successfully. Description has been verified by further observation, still more strikingly be prediction, and sometimes, more ominously, by control of natural forces. Happily, unresolved problems… still remain as challenges.”

George Frederick James Temple

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

“The subject matter of mathematics has increased so rapidly and extensively that there is some element of truth in maintaining that mathematics is not so much a subject as a way of studying any subject, not so much a science as a way of life. We turn, then, from the attempt to characterize the material object of mathematics to an attempt to determine its formal object, i. e., its methodology.”

George Frederick James Temple

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)