“Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.”

— William Poundstone

Part Three, Arbitrage, This Is Not the Time To Buy Stocks, p. 132
Fortune's Formula (2005)

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 "Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thale…" by William Poundstone?

William Poundstone 33

American writer 1955

Related quotes

“In 1735 the solving of an astronomical problem, proposed by the Academy, for which several eminent mathematicians had demanded several months' time, was achieved in three days by Euler with aid of improved methods of his own… With still superior methods this same problem was solved by the illustrious Gauss in one hour.”

Florian Cajori book A History of Mathematics

Source: A History of Mathematics (1893), p. 248; As cited in: Moritz (1914, 155); Persons and anecdotes.

“The problem of the direct determination of the primitive roots of a prime number is one of the 'cruces' of the Theory of Numbers. Euler, who first observed the peculiarity of these numbers, has yet left us no rigorous proof of their existence; though assuming their existence, he succeeded in accurately determining their number. The defect in his demonstration was first supplied by Gauss, who has also proposed an indirect method for finding a primitive root.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

Report on the Theory of Numbers (1859) Part I, p. 49.
The Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894) Vol. 1

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

“First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

As quoted in Comic Sections (Dublin 1993) by D MacHale

“We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

The War On Drugs Is Lost (1995)
Context: More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.

“I'd play for half my salary if I could hit in this dump all the time.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Assessment of Wrigley Field shouted during batting practice on October 1, 1932, just prior to Game 3 of the World Series, as recalled by Ruth in a February 1944 interview with Chicago Daily News sports editor John Carmichael; as reproduced in "The Sports Parade" by Braven Dryer, in The Los Angeles Times (February 23, 1944), p. A7; and in Babe Ruth's Called Shot: The Myth and Mystery of Baseball's Greatest Home Run https://books.google.com/books?id=JlOsBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA80 (2014) by Ed Sherman, p. 80

“Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month. In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles.”

Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects

"Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias" at kuro5hin (25 July 2001) https://web.archive.org/web/20010814102033/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/25/103136/121

“Now, Social Security through the years, for many many people, has been a terrible investment. It's really a tax, that's all it is. Social Security is a tax.”

Todd Akin (1947) American politician

Washington Minute, CSPAN, , quoted in * 2011-03-19
GOP Rep. Todd Akin On Social Security: ‘I Don’t Like It’
Alex
Seitz-Wald
Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/19/151641/todd-akin-i-dont-like-social-security/

“But once we bring historical time into the argument, it is not so easy to present the free play of the market as an ideal mechanism for maximizingwelfare and securing social justice.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Economic Heresies (1971), Chapter IV, Increasing and Diminishing Returns, p. 63

“Nothing works all the time and in all kinds of markets.”

George Goodman (1930–2014) American author and economics commentator

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 9, Mr Smith Admits His Biases, p. 104

“Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

William Poundstone 33

Related quotes

Related topics