Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.

There is nothing more exciting than having a life devoted to fundamental knowledge and to contributing to advance the borders of knowledge.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

I love academics, theory and all that. I love and admire that and try to do as much reading as I can.

I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.

What makes me happy is just keeping my brain challenged and stimulated and on its toes.

My own interest developed because I thought it was a fascinating subject and something I wanted to pursue.

If I'm flying to China, I can sit and think about a problem. Other scientists have to go to the lab. I'm always thinking about maths, even when I'm doing other things. A lot of the time you're going up blind alleys and it's very frustrating, but then you have a sudden rush of ideas. You can live off that for quite some time.

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

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.

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.

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.

To think is not enough, you must think of something.

The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.

When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

Noting all these things with the great delight which learning gives, we cannot but be stirred by these discoveries when we reflect upon the influence of them one by one.

I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.

I usually find that the process of discovery is more interesting than the answers.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

He that gives a portion of his time and talent to the investigation of mathematical truth, will come to all other questions with a decided advantage over his opponents.

For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape.