Euclid Quotes

Euclid ‘s manner of exposition, progressing relentlessly from the data to the unknown and from the hypothesis to the conclusion, is perfect for checking the argument in detail but far from being perfect for making understandable the main line of the argument.

The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid’s theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.

Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.