“To describe means to classify, and the man Poincaré defies classification, as does indeed his philosophy.”

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast

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 "To describe means to classify, and the man Poincaré defies classification, as does indeed his philosophy." by Tobias Dantzig?

Tobias Dantzig25

American mathematician 1884–1956

Related quotes

“Ultimately, discovery and invention are both problems of classification, and classification is fundamentally a problem of finding sameness. When we classify, we seek to group things that have a common structure or exhibit a common behavior.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 133

“It is essential to realize at this point that the formalism to be developed, although we cast it initially primarily in the framework of natural systems, is in fact applicable to any situation in which a class of objects is associated with real numbers, or in fact classified or indexed by any set whatever. It is thus applicable to any situation in which classification, or recognition, or discrimination is involved; indeed, one of the aims of our formalism is to point up the essential equivalence of the measurement problem in physics with all types of recognition or classification mechanisms based on observable properties of the objects being recognized or classified.”

Robert Rosen (1934–1998) American theoretical biologist

Source: Fundamentals of measurement and representation of natural systems. (1978), Ch. 2. The Basic Formalism; Quoted in: Mikulecky, Donald C. " Robert Rosen: the well‐posed question and its answer‐why are organisms different from machines? http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html." Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17.5 (2000): 419-432.

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

“Selected Aphorisms from the Athenaeum (1798)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #96
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“Learning science means learning to talk science… Talking science means observing, describing, comparing, classifying, analysing, discussing, hypothesizing, theorizing, questioning, challenging, arguing, designing experiments, following procedures, judging, evaluating, deciding, concluding, generalizing, reporting … in and through the language of science.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 1; as cited in: Bernard Laplante, "Teaching science to language minority students in elementary classrooms." NYSABE Journal 12 (1997): 62-83.