James Joseph Sylvester
James Joseph Sylvester
James Joseph Sylvester FRSwas an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was professor at Oxford...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth3 September 1814
music dream thinking
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
ideas rivers should
A mathematical idea should not be petrified in a formalised axiomatic setting, but should be considered instead as flowing as a river.
math reason mathematics
Mathematics is the music of reason.
tombstone science might
Surely with as good reason as had Archimedes to have the cylinder, cone and sphere engraved on his tombstone might our distinguished countrymen leave testamentary directions for the cubic eikosiheptagram to be engraved on theirs. Spirit of the Universe! wither are we drifting, and when, where, and how is all this to end?
ideas numbers spheres
Number, place, and combination . . . the three intersecting but distinct spheres of thought to which all mathematical ideas admit of being referred.
study euclid made
The early study of Euclid made me a hater of geometry.
mind intellectual world
...There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being....
talking giving study
I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize.
ideas mind unseen
What a glorious title, Nature, a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than a cosmos, more than a universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual, Nature and Nature's God, mind and matter. I am lost in admiration of the effulgent blaze of ideas it calls forth.