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Friedrich Reidt
(9 Mar 1834 - c. 1894)
mathematician was a teacher at the Gymnasium Hammonense (1861-1894) and wrote several textbooks for high-school mathematics. He was Deputy Mayor in Hamm (1881-1885). A short biography says that he died shortly after 1894.
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Science Quotes by Friedrich Reidt (3 quotes)
Exercise in the most rigorous thinking that is possible will of its own accord strengthen the sense of truth and right, for each advance in the ability to distinguish between correct and false thoughts, each habit making for rigour in thought development will increase in the sound pupil the ability and the wish to ascertain what is right in life and to defend it.
— Friedrich Reidt
In Anleitung zum mathematischen Unterricht in den höheren Schulen (1906), 28.
Mathematics, among all school subjects, is especially adapted to further clearness, definite brevity and precision in expression, although it offers no exercise in flights of rhetoric. This is due in the first place to the logical rigour with which it develops thought, avoiding every departure from the shortest, most direct way, never allowing empty phrases to enter. Other subjects excel in the development of expression in other respects: translation from foreign languages into the mother tongue gives exercise in finding the proper word for the given foreign word and gives knowledge of laws of syntax, the study of poetry and prose furnish fit patterns for connected presentation and elegant form of expression, composition is to exercise the pupil in a like presentation of his own or borrowed thoughtsand their development, the natural sciences teach description of natural objects, apparatus and processes, as well as the statement of laws on the grounds of immediate sense-perception. But all these aids for exercise in the use of the mother tongue, each in its way valuable and indispensable, do not guarantee, in the same manner as mathematical training, the exclusion of words whose concepts, if not entirely wanting, are not sufficiently clear. They do not furnish in the same measure that which the mathematician demands particularly as regards precision of expression.
— Friedrich Reidt
In Anleitung zum mathematischen Unterricht in höheren Schulen (1906), 17.
The participation in the general development of the mental powers without special reference to his future vocation must be recognized as the essential aim of mathematical instruction.
— Friedrich Reidt
In Anleitung zum Mathematischen Unterricht an höheren Schulen (1906), 12.
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) -- 
