Euclid Quotes

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

Mathematics has two faces: it is the rigorous science of Euclid, but it is also something else. Mathematics presented in the Euclidean way appears as a systematic, deductive science; but mathematics in the making appears as an experimental, inductive science. Both aspects are as old as the science of mathematics itself.

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

Detest it as lewd intercourse, it can deprive you of all your leisure, your health, your rest, and the whole happiness of your life.
Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid’s postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son JГЎnos from any further attempt.

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

Euclid for children is barbarous.

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 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 manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.

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 early study of Euclid made me a hater of geometry.

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

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.

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

If Euclid’s point, though incapable of being drawn by any human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live.

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

I was interviewed on the Israeli radio for five minutes and I said that more than 2000 years ago, Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes.В  Immediately the host interrupted me and asked, ‘Are there still infinitely many primes?’