“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.

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Ivar Ekeland 18

French mathematician 1944

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