Felix Klein Quotes

The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.

I turn aside with a shudder of horror from this lamentable plague of functions which have no derivatives.

Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?

And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences.

History was easy, but I don't know about the Calculus. It seemed like it was making sense, so that probably means I failed.

Mathematics is the gate and key to science.

If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

No one wants to read a math book.

I got good grades in math, but I never really enjoyed it. My favorite part of math was algebra, but geometry was the worst.

I dislike math, yet I respect and appreciate the fact that math is the language of the universe.

Mathematics is the true language that the universe is written in. They key to understanding the world around us.

Approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone ...

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

I'm a mathematician and always have been, as far as I can remember. I don't remember when I first got involved with mathematics, but I think of myself always as a mathematician first.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.