There Are No Solved Problems; There Are

Chance ... Must Be Something More Than The Name We Give To Our Ignorance.

Talk With M. Hermite. He Never Evokes A Concrete Image, Yet You Soon Perceive That The More Abstract Entities Are To Him Like Living Creatures.

Mathematicians Do Not Study Objects, But Relations Among Objects; They Are Indifferent To The Replacement Of Objects By Others As Long The Relations Don't Change. Matter Is Not Important, Only Form Interests Them.

I Then Began To Study Arithmetical Questions Without Any Great Apparent Result, And Without Suspecting That They Could Have The Least Connexion With My Previous Researches. Disgusted At My Want Of Success, I Went Away To Spend A Few Days At The Seaside, And Thought Of Entirely Different Things. One Day, As I Was Walking On The Cliff, The Idea Came To Me, Again With The Same Characteristics Of Conciseness, Suddenness, And Immediate Certainty, That Arithmetical Transformations Of Indefinite Ternary Quadratic Forms Are Identical With Those Of Non-euclidian Geometry.

But All Of My Efforts Served Only To Make Me Better Acquainted With The Difficulty, Which In Itself Was Something.