Skip to content

The famous sixteenth-century algebraist Jerome Cardan called negative roots fictitious, and the founder of modern symbolic algebra, François Viète, discarded negative roots entirely. Descartes, called them false on the ground that they represented numbers less than nothing and so were meaningless.

— Morris Kline Mathematics and the Physical World (1959)

Another quote →

More quotes by Morris Kline

The Pythagoreans associated good and evil with the limited and unlimited, respectively.

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

The Greeks failed to comprehend the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and infinite processes. They "shrank before the silence of the infinite spaces."

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

Fermat applied his method of tangents to many difficult problems. The method has the form of the now-standard method of differential calculus, though it begs entirely the difficult theory of limits.

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

Aristotle says the infinite is imperfect, unfinished, and therefore unthinkable; it is formless and confused. Only as objects are delimited and distinct do they have a nature.

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

Laplace created a number of new mathematical methods that were subsequently expanded into branches of mathematics, but he never cared for mathematics except as it helped him to study nature.

Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

All Morris Kline quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Morris Kline (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.