Euclid Quotes

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid’s Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.

The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid’s first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.

Euclid ‘s manner of exposition, progressing relentlessly from the data to the unknown and from the hypothesis to the conclusion, is perfect for checking the argument in detail but far from being perfect for making understandable the main line of the argument.

Euclid for children is barbarous.

I was interviewed on the Israeli radio for five minutes and I said that more than 2000 years ago, Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes.В  Immediately the host interrupted me and asked, ‘Are there still infinitely many primes?’

The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid’s theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

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.

Mathematics has two faces: it is the rigorous science of Euclid, but it is also something else. Mathematics presented in the Euclidean way appears as a systematic, deductive science; but mathematics in the making appears as an experimental, inductive science. Both aspects are as old as the science of mathematics itself.

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere.

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.