Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

It is shocking that young people should be addling their brains over mere logical subtleties in Euclid's Elements, trying to understand the proof of one obvious fact in terms of something equally .. obvious.

Euclid for children is barbarous.

Criticized for using formal mathematical manipulations, without understanding how they worked: Should I refuse a good dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion?

...there is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.