"So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma."
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People from DublinUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumniMathematicians from Ireland
Original Language: English
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Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus (1972) p. iv. .
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_John_Stephen_Smith
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Henry John Stephen Smith
Henry John Stephen Smith (2 November 1826 – 9 February 1883) was a mathematician remembered for his work in elementary divisors, quadratic forms, matrix theory, and number theory.
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