Andre Weil Quotes

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

Kids can amuse themselves with almost anything.

Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

Mathematicians aren't motivated by money and material gain, or even by practical applications of their work. For us it's the glory of solving one of the great unsolved problems that have outwitted previous generations of mathematicians. …. Despite all the things we've discovered over the last 7 millennia, there are still many things we don't understand.

People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.

A lot of times, you think of things as being science fiction, but the creation of the ideas makes you want to solve them. Then, in solving them, they give us greater capability.

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.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.