Deviner avant de dรฉmontrer! Ai-je besoin de rappeler que c'est ainsi que se sont faites toutes les dรฉcouvertes importantes.
Henri PoincareIt may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.
Henri PoincareIdeas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
Henri PoincareIt may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.
Henri PoincareI entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.
Henri Poincare