Richard Courant Quotes

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection.

With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.

Euler - The unsurpassed master of analytic invention.

It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.