Quotes by James Joseph Sylvester

“Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it see...”

“Mathematics is the music of reason.”

“May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the work...”

“The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.”

“Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to poss...”

“It seems to be expected of every pilgrim up the slopes of the mathematical Parnassus, that he will at some point or other of his journey sit down and invent a definite integral or two towards the i...”

“The object of pure Physic[s] is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic[s] that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.”

“Number, place, and combination . . . the three intersecting but distinct spheres of thought to which all mathematical ideas admit of being referred.”

“As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.”

“It always seems to me absurd to speak of a complete proof of a theorem being rigorously demonstrated. An incomplete proof is no proof and a mathematical truth not rigorously demonstrated is not dem...”

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diopha...”

“It has been said that to appreciate what virtue and morals mean, men must live virtuous and moral lives. It is equally true, that a knowledge of the objects of science is not to be attained by any ...”

“As a public teacher of mere striplings, I am often amazed by the facility and absence of resistance with which the principles of the infinitesimal calculus are accepted and assimilated by the prese...”

“To know him was to know one of the historic figures of all time, one of the immortals; and when he was really moved to speak, his eloquence equalled his genius.”

“Professor Sylvester's first high class at the new university Johns Hopkins consisted of only one student, G. B. Halsted, who had persisted in urging Sylvester to lecture on the modern algebra. The ...”