A Quote by Henri Poincare

Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects; they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.

Henri Poincare

Quote Topics

Among Change Don't Change Form Important Indifferent Interests Long Mathematicians Matter Objects Only Others Relations Replacement Study Them

Quote Author

Henri Poincare
French - Mathematician
April 29, 1854 - July 17, 1912

Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only.

Henri Poincare

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.

Henri Poincare

Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects.

Henri Poincare

...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged.

Henri Poincare

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.

Sheila Heti

The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects.

Werner Heisenberg

[Mathematics is] purely intellectual, a pure theory of forms, which has for its objects not the combination of quantities or their images, the numbers, but things of thought to which there could correspond effective objects or relations, even though such a correspondence is not necessary.

Hermann Hankel

When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other.

Pranav Mistry

I agree that science is the best way of understanding the natural world, and therefore that we have reason to believe what the best science tells us about the objects in that world and the relations between them. But this does not mean that the natural world is the only thing we can have true beliefs about. The status of material objects as things that are "real" is a matter of their having physical properties, such as weight, solidity, and spatio-temporal location. In order to be real, such things need not have, in addition to these properties, some further kind of metaphysical existence.

T. M. Scanlon

We don’t go further than what Marx called the exchange value of the actual object - we don’t think about the relations that that object embodies - and were important to the production of that object whether it’s our food or our clothes or our I-pads or all the materials we use to acquire an education at an institution like this. That would really be revolutionary to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment.

Angela Davis

What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Clive Bell

My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures.

Gerhard Richter

I love the life of objects. When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects.

Josef Sudek

Object-oriented programming aficionados think that everything is an object.... this [isn't] so. There are things that are objects. Things that have state and change their state are objects. And then there are things that are not objects. A binary search is not an object. It is an algorithm