Source: In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day: How To Survive And Thrive When Opportunity Roars
“The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future;”
Source: The Development of Mathematics (1940), p. 283
Context: The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future; and should analysis ever appear to be without or blemish, its perfection might only be that of death.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Eric Temple Bell 14
mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland w… 1883–1960Related quotes

Quoted by C. S. Hastings in "Biographical Memoir of Josiah Willard Gibbs 1839-1903," National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, vol. VI (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1909), p. 390. Complete memoir http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/jgibbs.pdf
Attributed

“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.”
As quoted in The Reader's Digest (October 1994), p. 185
Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Source: Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982
100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.