André Weil Quotes

Already while at the Ecole Normale, I had been deeply struck by the damage wreaked upon mathematics in France by World War I. This war had created a vacuum that my own and subsequent generations were hard pressed to fill. In 1914, the Germans had wisely sought to spare the cream of their young scientific elite and, to a large extent, these people had been sheltered. In France a misguided notion of equality in the face of sacrifice - no doubt praiseworthy in intent - had led to the opposite policy, whose disastrous consequences can be read, for example, on the monument to the dead of the Ecole Normale. Those were cruel losses; but there was more besides. Four or more years of military life, whether close to death or far away from it - but in any case far from science -, are not good preparation for resuming the scientific life: very few of those who survived returned to science with the keenness they had felt for it. This was a fate that I thought it my duty, or rather my dharma, to avoid.

Is it mere coincidence that in India Pāṇini's invention of grammar had preceded that of decimal notation and negative numbers, and that later on, both grammar and algebra reached the unparalleled heights for which the medieval civilization of the Arabic-speaking world is known?

About ancient mathematics (whether Greek or Mesopotamian) and medieval mathematics (Western or Oriental), the would-be historian must of necessity confine himself to the description of a comparatively small number of islands accidentally emerging from an ocean of ignorance, and to tenuous conjectural reconstructions of the submerged continents which at one time must have bridged the gaps between them.

Mozart's music, even at its most beautiful, often gives an impression of some being who, though very far above us in his incomprehensible serenity, nevertheless stops to remember us for a brief instant and comes within our reach, with gentle mockery and tender pity, to transcribe a fleeting message for us. But sometimes, in certain quartets and quintets, and in certain parts of The Magic Flute, this same being, without a thought for us, communicates with his fellow beings, and what we hear then is a world unknown to us, a world of which we are allowed only a furtive glimpse.

Hopf, back from Amsterdam, was teaching Brouwer's topology. He had helped arrange lodgings for me quite close to where he lived, rather far from the center of town, and together we would take the long tram ride to the university. One day I asked him what he would do when he got tired of topology. He replied in all seriousness: "But I'll never get tired of topology!"

(April 7) My mathematics work is proceeding beyond my wildest hopes, and I am even a bit worried - if it's only in prison that I work so well, will I have to arrange to spend two or three months locked up every year? In the meantime, I am contemplating writing a report to the proper authorities, as follows: "To the Director of Scientific Research: Having recently been in a position to discover through personal experience the considerable advantages afforded to pure and distinterested research by a stay in the establishments of the Penitentiary System, I take the liberty of, etc. etc."

I began to combine this ordinary form of touring with a specifically mathematical variety. I had formed the ambition of becoming, like Hadamard, a "universal" mathematician: the way I expressed it was that I wished to know more than non-specialists and less than specialists about every mathematical topic. Naturally, I did not achieve either goal.

[<nowiki/>Otto Schmidt] called together the principal mathematicians in Moscow and Petrograd (later known as Leningrad) and spoke to them more or less as follows: "Whatever the regime, the work of mathematicians is too inaccessible to laymen for us to be criticized from the outside; as long as we stick together, we will remain invulnerable."

I had also, unsuccessfully, looked for the works of Saint John of the Cross. The flashing beauty of his poems would probably have moved me more than did Saint Theresa, but it was not until much later that I came to know his work. I read a little of Saint Theresa and became quickly convinced that mystic thought is at bottom the same in all times and places: reading Suzuki's popular works on Zen was soon to confirm this conclusion. ... Speaking of a saint whose behavior was somewhat eccentric, one of the monks remarked gently: "But Christianity is madness" ("el cristianismo es una locum"). This perfectly orthodox statement often comes to mind when I think about my sister's life.

Both the Jews and the brahmins of southern India are communities that, for twenty centuries, have devoted themselves tirelessly to the most abstract subtleties of grammar and theology. For the Jews it was the study of the Talmud, a task often passed down from father to son; for the brahmins, it was the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. It is hardly surprising that the younger generations, when their time came, turned toward the sciences, and preferably the most abstract among them: this trend was merely the natural extension of millennial traditions.

Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced, if only rarely, the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously, and in which the unconscious (however one interprets this word) seems to play a role. In a famous passage, Poincaré describes how he discovered Fuchsian functions in such a moment. About such states, Gauss is said to have remarked as follows: "Procreare jucundum (to conceive is a pleasure)"; he added, however, "sed parturire molestum (but to give birth is painful)." Unlike sexual pleasure, this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do so at will, unless perhaps by dogged work which it seems to reward with its appearance. It is true that the pleasure experienced is not necessarily in proportion with the value of the discoveries with which it is associated.

Awaiting me upon my return to Strasbourg were Henri Cartan and the course on "differential and integral calculus," which was our joint responsibility. ... One point that concerned him was the degree to which we should generalize Stokes' formula in our teaching. ... In his book on invariant integrals, Elie Cartan, following Poincare in emphasizing the importance of this formula, proposed to extend its domain of validity. Mathematically speaking, the question was of a depth that far exceeded what we were in a position to suspect. ... One winter day toward the end of 1934,1 thought of a brilliant way of putting an end to my friend's persistent questioning. We had several friends who were responsible for teaching the same topics in various universities. "Why don't we get together and settle such matters once and for all, and you won't plague me with your questions any more?" Little did I know that at that moment Bourbaki was born.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

[On meeting Raymond Paley] At first, we seemed to be on completely different wavelengths. Finally, it became apparent to me that he worked fruitfully only when competing with others: having the rest of the pack at his side spurred him to greater efforts as he tried to surpass them. In contrast, my style was to seek out topics that I felt exposed me to no competition whatsoever, leaving me free to reflect undisturbed for years. No doubt every scientific discipline has room for such differences of temperament. What does it matter if a given researcher is motivated primarily by hopes of winning the Nobel prize? Sometimes it seems to me that Ganesh, the Hindu god of knowledge, chooses the bait, noble or vulgar, best suited to each of his followers.

It is hard for you to appreciate that modern mathematics has become so extensive and so complex that it is essential, if mathematics is to stay as a whole and not become a pile of little bits of research, to provide a unification, which absorbs in some simple and general theories all the common substrata of the diverse branches if the science, suppressing what is not so useful and necessary, and leaving intact what is truly the specific detail of each big problem. This is the good one can achieve with axiomatics (and this is no small achievement). This is what Bourbaki is up to.