"The function just found cannot, it is true, express rigorously the probabilities of the errors: for since the possible errors are in all cases confined within certain limits, the probability of errors exceeding those limits ought always to be zero, while our formula always gives some value. However, this defect, which every analytical function must, from its nature, labor under, is of no importance in practice, because the value of our function decreases so rapidly... that it can safely be considered as vanishing. Besides, the nature of the subject never admits of assigning with absolute rigor the limits of error."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from GermanyInventorsMathematicians from GermanyPhysicists from GermanyAstronomers from Germany
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (1857)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer and physicist.
65 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Carl Friedrich Gauss →
Related Quotes
"But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations."
"The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime facto…"
"The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courag…"
"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest …"
"In researches in which an infinity of directions of straight lines in space is concerned, it is advantageous to repre…"
"Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems."
"Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, m…"
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense…"
"We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our mind…"
"I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily la…"