Morris Kline Quotes

Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire.

There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.

Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

All mathematical proofs must be deductive. Each proof is a chain of deductive arguments, each of which has its premises and conclusion.

predecessor of Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, maintained that irrational numbers have no meaning independent of geometric lengths.

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.