To The Distracting Occupations Belong Especially My

To Praise It Would Amount To Praising Myself. For The Entire Content Of The Work... Coincides Almost Exactly With My Own Meditations Which Have Occupied My Mind For The Past Thirty Or Thirty-five Years.

That This Subject [of Imaginary Magnitudes] Has Hitherto Been Considered From The Wrong Point Of View And Surrounded By A Mysterious Obscurity, Is To Be Attributed Largely To An Ill-adapted Notation. If, For Example, +1, -1, And The Square Root Of -1 Had Been Called Direct, Inverse And Lateral Units, Instead Of Positive, Negative And Imaginary (or Even Impossible), Such An Obscurity Would Have Been Out Of The Question.

You Have No Idea, How Much Poetry There Is In The Calculation Of A Table Of Logarithms!

By Explanation The Scientist Understands Nothing Except The Reduction To The Least And Simplest Basic Laws Possible, Beyond Which He Cannot Go, But Must Plainly Demand Them; From Them However He Deduces The Phenomena Absolutely Completely As Necessary.

I Have A True Aversion To Teaching. The Perennial Business Of A Professor Of Mathematics Is Only To Teach The Abc Of His Science; Most Of The Few Pupils Who Go A Step Further, And Usually To Keep The Metaphor, Remain In The Process Of Gathering Information, Become Only Halbwisser [one Who Has Superficial Knowledge Of The Subject], For The Rarer Talents Do Not Want To Have Themselves Educated By Lecture Courses, But Train Themselves. And With This Thankless Work The Professor Loses His Precious Time.