TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Symbolism

Symbolism Quotes (5 quotes)

I venture to assert that the feelings one has when the beautiful symbolism of the infinitesimal calculus first gets a meaning, or when the delicate analysis of Fourier has been mastered, or while one follows Clerk Maxwell or Thomson into the strange world of electricity, now growing so rapidly in form and being, or can almost feel with Stokes the pulsations of light that gives nature to our eyes, or track with Clausius the courses of molecules we can measure, even if we know with certainty that we can never see them I venture to assert that these feelings are altogether comparable to those aroused in us by an exquisite poem or a lofty thought.
In paper (May 1891) read before Bath Branch of the Teachers’ Guild, published in The Practical Teacher (July 1891), reprinted as 'Geometry', in Frederic Spencer, Chapters on the Aims and Practice of Teaching (1897), 194.
Science quotes on:  |  Analysis (244)  |  Arouse (13)  |  Assert (69)  |  Beautiful (271)  |  Being (1276)  |  Calculus (65)  |  Certainty (180)  |  Rudolf Clausius (9)  |  Clerk (13)  |  Comparable (7)  |  Course (413)  |  Delicate (45)  |  Electricity (168)  |  Exquisite (27)  |  Eye (440)  |  Feel (371)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Feelings (52)  |  First (1302)  |  Follow (389)  |  Form (976)  |  Growing (99)  |  Infinitesimal (30)  |  Infinitesimal Calculus (2)  |  Know (1538)  |  Light (635)  |  Lofty (16)  |  Master (182)  |  Mathematics As A Fine Art (23)  |  Maxwell (42)  |  James Clerk Maxwell (91)  |  Meaning (244)  |  Measure (241)  |  Molecule (185)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Never (1089)  |  Poem (104)  |  Pulsation (4)  |  Rapidly (67)  |  See (1094)  |  Sir George Gabriel Stokes (3)  |  Strange (160)  |  Sir J.J. Thomson (18)  |  Thought (995)  |  Track (42)  |  World (1850)

Symbolism is useful because it makes things difficult. Now in the beginning everything is self-evident, and it is hard to see whether one self-evident proposition follows from another or not. Obviousness is always the enemy to correctness. Hence we must invent a new and difficult symbolism in which nothing is obvious. … Thus the whole of Arithmetic and Algebra has been shown to require three indefinable notions and five indemonstrable propositions.
In International Monthly (1901), 4, 85-86.
Science quotes on:  |  Algebra (117)  |  Arithmetic (144)  |  Begin (275)  |  Beginning (312)  |  Correct (95)  |  Difficult (263)  |  Enemy (86)  |  Everything (489)  |  Evident (92)  |  Follow (389)  |  Hard (246)  |  Indefinable (5)  |  Invent (57)  |  Mathematics As A Language (20)  |  Must (1525)  |  New (1273)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Notion (120)  |  Obvious (128)  |  Obviousness (3)  |  Proposition (126)  |  Require (229)  |  See (1094)  |  Self (268)  |  Self-Evident (22)  |  Show (353)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Useful (260)  |  Whole (756)

The modern development of mathematical logic dates from Boole’s Laws of Thought (1854). But in him and his successors, before Peano and Frege, the only thing really achieved, apart from certain details, was the invention of a mathematical symbolism for deducing consequences from the premises which the newer methods shared with Aristotle.
From a Lowell Lecture delivered in Boston (Apr 1914), 'Logic as the Essence of Philosophy". Published in Our Knowledge of the External World: As A Field For Scientific Method in Philosophy (1914), Lecture II, 40. Also quoted in William Bragg Ewald, From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics (1996), Vol. 1, footnote, 442. In the Footnote, Ewalt contrasts a more “romantic” view of Boole written by Russell for a popular audience. Refer to the latter quote elsewhere on this Bertrand Russell webpage, which begins “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole….”
Science quotes on:  |  Achieve (75)  |  Aristotle (179)  |  George Boole (12)  |  Consequence (220)  |  Deduce (27)  |  Detail (150)  |  Gottlob Frege (12)  |  Invention (400)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Mathematics And Logic (27)  |  Method (531)  |  New (1273)  |  Giuseppe Peano (3)  |  Premise (40)  |  Share (82)  |  Successor (16)

There is a poignant symbolism in the fact that the giant rockets now stand poised on the edge of the Pacific where the covered wagons halted only two lifetimes ago.
In 'Rocket to the Renaissance', republished in a collection of essays written in 1959-1961, Profiles of the Future (1962), 85.
Science quotes on:  |  Halt (10)  |  Lifetime (40)  |  Pacific (4)  |  Poignant (3)  |  Poised (2)  |  Rocket (52)

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Jason Merchey, Values of the Wise (2004), 31.
Science quotes on:  |  Do (1905)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Flag (12)  |  Hopeful (6)  |  Vacuum (41)  |  Wave (112)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.