The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
More Quotes from E. T. Bell:
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.E. T. Bell
Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
E. T. Bell
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.
E. T. Bell
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
E. T. Bell
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.Paddy Ashdown
You never know if they like you for who you are or what you are. Would he love me or the money?
Anna Nicole Smith
The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism.
Alma Gluck