“…The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit…”

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought"

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 "…The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit…" by Alfred North Whitehead?
Alfred North Whitehead photo
Alfred North Whitehead 112
English mathematician and philosopher 1861–1947

Related quotes

Saul Bellow photo
Oswald Veblen photo

“Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry.”

Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) American mathematician

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 30 (1924), p. 289.

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Annie Besant photo

“Yet that is the most splendid privilege of man, that the true birthright of the human Spirit, to know his own Divinity, and then to realise it, to know his own Divinity and then to manifest it.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: The Theosophist, Volume 33 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=wJ9VAAAAYAAJ, p. 190

Henri Poincaré photo

“What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.”

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 5: Analysis and Physics
Context: All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...
This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;
... the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist.
... law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...
In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize?... in this choice what shall guide us?
It can only be analogy.... What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.<!--pp.76-77

George Steiner photo
Julia Ward Howe photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

“This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Here Longfellow is translating or paraphrasing an expression attributed to a canon of Seville, also quoted as "we shall have a church so great and of such a kind that those who see it built will think we were mad".
Table-Talk (1857)
Context: "Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.

Related topics