Ivar Ekeland Quotes

Ivar I. Ekeland is a French mathematician of Norwegian descent. Ekeland has written influential monographs and textbooks on nonlinear functional analysis, the calculus of variations, and mathematical economics, as well as popular books on mathematics, which have been published in French, English, and other languages. Ekeland is known as the author of Ekeland's variational principle and for his use of the Shapley–Folkman lemma in optimization theory. He has contributed to the periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems and particularly to the theory of Kreĭn indices for linear systems . Ekeland helped to inspire the discussion of chaos theory in Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park. Wikipedia

✵ 2. July 1944

Ivar Ekeland: 18 quotes 0 likes

Famous Ivar Ekeland Quotes

“We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 1, Keeping The Beat, p. 6.

“The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 162.

“The transition from integrable to non integrable systems is quiet interesting to observe.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 4, From Computation To Geometry, p. 100.

“The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 150.

“Power is no linger seen as inheriting its legitimacy from some divine authority; it is a mere convention which we adhere to because we are born and educated into it, and because we see others conform to it. Its strength lies in the fact that we believe that others believe in it: power is no more than the illusion of power. The exercise of power is a constant fight to keep up appearances.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 164.

“The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 2, The Birth of Modern Science, p. 34.

Ivar Ekeland Quotes

“There is no invisible hand guiding these processes, dealing out victory to the most deserving.
Chance is their leader.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 7, May The Best One Win, p. 144.
Context: In the struggle for life, or in the struggle for power, there is no reason why their victory would make the world better than it was. There is no invisible hand guiding these processes, dealing out victory to the most deserving.
Chance is their leader.

Chance , Victory

“It is a testimony to the power of education that classical mechanics could operate for so long under a mistaken conception. Teaching and research concentrated on integrable systems, each feeding the other, until in the end we had no longer the tools nor the interest for studying nonintegrable systems.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 4, From Computation To Geometry, p. 84.

Education , Study

“Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 3, The Least Action Principle, p. 48.

World , Waiting

“So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 2, The Birth of Modern Science, p. 39.

Life , God , Reality

“The moment when the scientists became engineers was a historical turning point.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 152.

“Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 6, Pandora's Box, p. 127.

History , Past , Future

“If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 6, Pandora's Box, p. 122.

God , Law

“An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 7, May The Best One Win, p. 141.

Game

“Well, it has been a long time since manna last fallen from from heaven. We cannot live alone; we rely on others to produce the stuff of our material and intellectual life, and we have to organize society so that its members will cooperate toward the common good.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 9, The Common Good, p. 167.

Life , Time

“The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case.”

Ivar Ekeland

Introduction, p. 1.
The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

World , Fear

“What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 10, A Personal Conclusion, p. 188.

Courage , Thinking

“Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity.”

Ivar Ekeland

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 7, May The Best One Win, p. 138.

Failure , Chance , Success

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