Ivar Ekeland

Quotes

• “The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case.”
• “We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own.”
• “The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones.”
• “So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance.”
• “Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions.”
• “It is a testimony to the power of education that classical mechanics could operate for so long under a mistaken conception. Teaching and research concentrated on integrable systems, each feeding the other, until in the end we had no longer the tools nor the interest for studying nonintegrable systems.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA