If People Do Not Believe That Mathematics

By And Large It Is Uniformly True In Mathematics That There Is A Time Lapse Between A Mathematical Discovery And The Moment When It Is Useful; And That This Lapse Of Time Can Be Anything From 30 To 100 Years, In Some Cases Even More; And That The Whole System Seems To Function Without Any Direction, Without Any Reference To Usefulness, And Without Any Desire To Do Things Which Are Useful.

If People Do Not Believe That Mathematics Is Simple, It Is Only Because They Do Not Realize How Complicated Life Is.

The Calculus Was The First Achievement Of Modern Mathematics And It Is Difficult To Overestimate Its Importance. I Think It Defines More Unequivocally Than Anything Else The Inception Of Modern Mathematics; And The System Of Mathematical Analysis, Which Is Its Logical Development, Still Constitutes The Greatest Technical Advance In Exact Thinking.

There Is No Point In Being Precise If You Do Not Even Know What You Are Talking About.

The Most Vitally Characteristic Fact About Mathematics Is, In My Opinion, Its Quite Peculiar Relationship To The Natural Sciences, Or More Generally, To Any Science Which Interprets Experience On A Higher Than Purely Descriptive Level.