Henry John Stephen Smith famous quotes

Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone.
-- Henry John Stephen Smith

#Math #Use #May

It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.
-- Henry John Stephen Smith

#Beauty #Gentleman #Mind

For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature.
-- Henry John Stephen Smith

#Class #Might #Cases

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...
-- Henry John Stephen Smith

#Country #Names #Age

Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe.
-- Henry John Stephen Smith

#Teaching #School #Taught Us

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.

Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.

I'm not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.

We may not preach a crucified Saviour without being also crucified men and women. It is not enough to wear an ornamental cross as a pretty decoration. The cross that Paul speaks about was burned into his very flesh, was branded into his being, and only the Holy Spirit can burn the true cross into our innermost life.

A bona fide spiritual master, under the guidance of authorities, can turn anyone to the Vaisnava cult so that naturally he may come to the topmost position of a brahmana.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.