“Aristotle would… by no means admit that mathematics was divorced from aesthetic; he could conceive, he said, of nothing more beautiful than the objects of mathematics.”

—  Thomas Little Heath

Preface p. v
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Aristotle would… by no means admit that mathematics was divorced from aesthetic; he could conceive, he said, of nothing…" by Thomas Little Heath?
Thomas Little Heath photo
Thomas Little Heath 46
British civil servant and academic 1861–1940

Related quotes

Maurice Allais photo

“Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits”

Maurice Allais (1911–2010) French economist; 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

in La formation scientifique, Une communication du Prix Nobel d’économie, Maurice Allais http://www.canalacademie.com/Maurice-Allais-la-formation.html, address to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (1997).
Context: Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation.
In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means.

André Weil photo

“Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results— he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

[Amir D. Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician, http://books.google.com/books?id=fRCH-at7wgYC&pg=PA53, 29 April 2009, Basic Books, 978-0-7867-3288-3, 54]
Quote About

“He who is unfamiliar with mathematics [literally, he who is a layman in mathematics] remains more or less a stranger to our time.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 39.

Ferdinand Eisenstein photo

“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 (1823–1852) German mathematician

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...

“The philosophy of the foundations of probability must be divorced from mathematics and statistics, exactly as the discussion of our intuitive space concept is now divorced from geometry.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 3.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)

Ronald Fisher photo

“I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

The evolutionary modification of genetic phenomena. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Genetics 1, 165-72, 1932.
1930s

Bertrand Russell photo

“I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept, were full of fallacies, and that, if certainty were indeed discoverable in mathematics, it would be in a new field of mathematics, with more solid foundations than those that had hitherto been thought secure. But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 53

Salvador Dalí photo

“If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 81

David Deutsch photo

“Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, mathematical certainty. It is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise. It is, and must be, mathematical explanation.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)

Frederick Rolfe photo

“Rolfe's vice was spiritual more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it had to be…If he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the Inferno.”

Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) British writer, photographer and historian

Graham Greene "Frederick Rolfe: Edwardian Inferno" (1934); cited from Collected Essays (New York: The Viking Press, 1969) p. 175
Criticism

Related topics