Eric Temple Bell Quotes (7 Quotes)

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

If 'Number rules the universe' as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

The Handmaiden of the Sciences.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.