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Quote by Charles Sanders Peirce

“...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.”

Quote by Charles Sanders Peirce

Book:Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

Work

Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce is a seminal work that gathers together the extensive and varied writings of one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. The collection offers insights into Peirce's contributions to the development of pragmatism, semiotics, and the philosophy of science. It includes his seminal essay 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear,' as well as numerous other works that explore the nature of truth, the role of the individual in knowledge, and the structure of scientific inquiry. more

Author

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, and scientist, born on September 10, 1839, and died on April 19, 1914. Known as the founder of modern symbolic logic, Peirce's philosophical ideas have had a profound impact on fields such as logic, philosophy of science, and cognitive science. more

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“Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.”

Source: Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce

“Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.”

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“We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.”

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“Man is full of desires: he loves only those who can satisfy them all. "This man is a good mathematician," someone will say. But I have no concern for mathematics; he would take me for a proposition. "That one is a good soldier." He would take me for a besieged town. I need, that is to say, a decent man who can accommodate himself to all my desires in a general sort of way.”

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“Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.”

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Book:The basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959

Source: The basic writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959

“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.”

Source: Autobiography

“Analytic It is clear that the definition of "logic" or "mathematics" must be sought by trying to give a new definition of the old notion of "analytic" propositions.”

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Book:The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

Source: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

“Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, "purely formal".”

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“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!”

“The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.”

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