Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
God is subtle but he is not malicious.
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.
I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself.
The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.
The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

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