Quotations

Henry Smith


View the biography of Henry Smith


[His toast:]
Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone.
Quoted in H Eves Mathematical Circles Squared (Boston 1972).
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.
Quoted in H Eves Mathematical Circles Squared (Boston 1972).
[Arithmetic] is one of the oldest branches, perhaps the very oldest branch, of human knowledge; and yet some of its most abstruse secrets lie close to its tritest truths.
Quoted in E T Bell, Men of Mathematics