Richard Courant Quotes

• Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

  Richard Courant

  Struggle, Years, Intellectual

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• Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

  Richard Courant

  Struggle, Expression, Perfection

  Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins, Ian Stewart (1996). “What is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods”, p.23, Oxford University Press, USA

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• With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

  Richard Courant

  Education, Reality, Men

  Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins (1979). “What is mathematics?: an elementary approach to ideas and methods”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection.

  Richard Courant

  Expression, Perfection, Mind

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• For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

  Richard Courant

  Philosophy, Science, Sensual

  "What is Mathematics?" by Richard Courant, (p. xix), 1941.

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• It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

  Richard Courant

  Motivation, Science, Essence

  "Mathematics in the Modern World". Scientific American, Vol 211, (p. 42), September 1964.

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• Euler - The unsurpassed master of analytic invention.

  Richard Courant

  Invention, Masters, Mathematician

  Richard Courant (1948). “Lectures on the theory of functions”

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• Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.

  Richard Courant

  Education, Systematic, Principles

  Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins (1979). “What is mathematics?: an elementary approach to ideas and methods”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.

  Richard Courant

  Men, Two, Sometimes

  8 Copy quote

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