Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Henry John Stephen Smith

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish mathematician Henry John Stephen Smith.

Last updated on November 7, 2024.

Prof Henry John Stephen Smith FRS FRSE FRAS LLD was an Irish mathematician and amateur astronomer remembered for his work in elementary divisors, quadratic forms, and Smith–Minkowski–Siegel mass formula in number theory. In matrix theory he is visible today in having his name on the Smith normal form of a matrix. Smith was also first to discover the Cantor set.

Irish - Mathematician | November 2, 1826 - February 9, 1883

Source: Wikipedia

Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone.

Henry John Stephen Smith

It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.

Henry John Stephen Smith

For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature.

Henry John Stephen Smith

Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe.

Henry John Stephen Smith

If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration.

Henry John Stephen Smith

Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Henry John Stephen Smith

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