[Abraham Gotthelf Kästner is] the best mathematician among poets and the best poet among mathematicians — Carl Friedrich Gauss Share this quote Post on X Facebook Download image Copy quote Copy link Share… Another quote → Source, in fullquoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 26: Non-Euclidean Geometries, p. 444. Gauss meant it as a sarcastic remark, after he presented his construction of the 17-gon, and Kästner failed to notice its significance. Topics Poetry
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. The Mind and the Eye (1954)
All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.
The study of Euler's works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics and nothing else can replace it.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations. About the proof of Wilson's theorem. Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801)
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'. George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds. Michael Faraday