"If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration."
"Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone."
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Source: Quoted in Alexander Macfarlane, Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (1916). Pure mathematics; may it never be of use to any man! is cited as the toast of the Mathematical Society of England in Science, 10 Dec. 1886.
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More quotes by Henry John Stephen Smith
"It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility."
"Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe."
"For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature."