"Speaking... from personal experience, one of the effects of prolonged study of some of the more abstract branches of Mathematics, as for example the Theory of Functions, is that one begins to take the greatest interest in, and to be most attracted by... aspects of the subject which are most remote from the interests of the Physicist. One gets into an attitude... in which the kind of well-behaved functions, without abnormal singularities... appear to have a somewhat bourgeois aspect, in their comparatively uninteresting respectability. In the mind of one who makes a minute and prolonged study of the peculiarities which Fourier's series may present, a[n]... effect of that study is that the ordinary Fourier's series, which converge everywhere... normally, begin to acquire a certain tameness... which deprives them of interest. The failure of convergence of Taylor's series becomes to some Mathematical students a matter of greater interest than that presented by the series in the ordinary cases in which... they are fitted for purposes of application."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics%2C_from_the_points_of_view_of_the_Mathematician_and_of_the_Physicist
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Mathematics, from the points of view of the Mathematician and of the Physicist
Mathematics, from the points of view of the Mathematician and of the Physicist: An address delivered to the Mathematical and Physical Society of University College, London by E. W. Hobson, Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., in the University of Cambridge, was published at the University Press, Cambridge in 1912.
Related Quotes
"In the scientific world... decidedly vague and narrow conceptions of the functions of Mathematical thinking are curre…"
"Mathematical thinking...has played a most important part in the formation of the concepts with which the Physical Sci…"
"Mathematical thinking, in a more or less explicit form, pervades every department of human activity. The grocer... Th…"
"Mathematical thought is... the most all-pervading and the most highly specialized department of mental activity."
"The more closely men scrutinized natural phenomena, at first for practical reasons, and later from intellectual curio…"
"But... the natural development of Mathematical thought, starting as it did in connection with the more obvious aspect…"
"[T]he Engineer, like the Physicist, has constantly to make use of Mathematical methods; but as his ultimate aim is to…"
"In former times the Mathematician and the Physicist were usually one and the same man. ...it was in the nineteenth ce…"
"I remember... at a Board meeting at Cambridge, the subject of Bessel's functions came into the discussion... to inclu…"
"If we were to question a man of average education, or even one... [in] the cultured class, as to what he conceives to…"