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Quote by Maria Goeppert-Mayer

“Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.”

Quote by Maria Goeppert-Mayer

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Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Maria Goeppert-Mayer was a German-born American physicist known for her contributions to the study of atomic nuclei. She made pioneering work in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, particularly in the research of the nuclear shell model. Goeppert-Mayer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for her contributions to nuclear physics. more

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“Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him ; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to rest had no tendency to prove them. But he had been endeavouring to give a more active and positive help than this to the cause of what he deemed pure religion.”

“On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.”

“Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.”