Quotes By 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
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
E. T. Bell
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
E. T. Bell
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.
E. T. Bell
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
E. T. Bell
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
E. T. Bell
If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
E. T. Bell