“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.”
-Hermann Weyl
“What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act… the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, and to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what used would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state… and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity… if it has no deeper meaning for me and for my life?” -Søren Kierkegaard in his Journals
“Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.” -Felix Klein
“You will have to brace yourselves for this — not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper — that’s all!” -Richard Feynman on Quantum Electrodynamics
“Made up of such individuals, of individuals at the moments when they are nothing, a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing.” -Søren Kierkegaard
In celebration of Women’s History month, this is for Emmy Noether (pronounced Nur-tur). She was one of the first well-known female mathematicians and overcame much prejudgment from the male dominated academia of the time. She was the first to concretely and rigorously describe the connection between symmetry and laws of nature. Albert Einstein, in the NY Times obituary he wrote for her, said
“In the judgment of the most competent mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”
Click the photo in order to read the full obituary.
