Euclid Quotes

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.

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

Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

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.

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

If Euclid’s point, though incapable of being drawn by any human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live.

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 taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

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.

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.

Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.

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

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.

Euclid for children is barbarous.

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

Detest it as lewd intercourse, it can deprive you of all your leisure, your health, your rest, and the whole happiness of your life.
Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid’s postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son JГЎnos from any further attempt.

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.