“We now come to a decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for… [The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for.”

—  Hermann Weyl

The Mathematical Way of Thinking (1941)

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Hermann Weyl photo
Hermann Weyl28
German mathematician 1885–1955

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S. I. Hayakawa photo

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as translated by Arnold Dresden from: Brouwer, L. E. J. (1913). Intuitionism and formalism. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 20(2), 81–96. (quote on p. 84)

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S. I. Hayakawa photo

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See also: The Meaning of Meaning (1923)
See also: Science and Sanity (1933)
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