"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of... intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings. ...We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions."
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Original Language: English
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Alan Turing, "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals" (1938) in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (1939) Series 2, Vol. 45.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics
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Mathematics
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