07 May 2019

On Beauty: Beauty and Mathematics VI (Unsourced)

“The beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort.” (George Pólya)

"Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there." (Marcus Du Sautoy)

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." (Buckminster Fuller)

"[…] the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely esthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know. And this is sensitivity." (Henri Poincaré)

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.” (Henri Poincaré)

"All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics." (Martin Gardner)

"There are some traits all mathematicians share. An obvious one is a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics." (Martin Gardner)

"I was struck by the art with which mathematicians remove, reject, and little by little eliminate everything that is not necessary for expressing the absolute with the least possible number of terms, while preserving in the arrangement of these terms a discrimination, a parallelism, a symmetry which seems to be the visible elegance and beauty of an eternal idea. (Edgar Quinet)

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