[1114]. As pure truth is the polar star of our science [mathematics], so it is the great advantage of our science over others that it awakens more easily the love of truth in our pupils.... If Hegel justly said, “Whoever does not know the works of the ancients, has lived without knowing beauty,” Schellbach responds with equal right, “Who does not know mathematics, and the results of recent scientific investigation, dies without knowing truth”—Simon, Max.
Quoted in J. W. A. Young: Teaching of Mathematics (New York, 1907), p. 44.
[1115]. Büchsel in his reminiscences from the life of a country parson relates that he sought his recreation in Lacroix’s Differential Calculus and thus found intellectual refreshment for his calling. Instances like this make manifest the great advantage which occupation with mathematics affords to one who lives remote from the city and is compelled to forego the pleasures of art. The entrancing charm of mathematics, which captivates every one who devotes himself to it, and which is comparable to the fine frenzy under whose ban the poet completes his work, has ever been incomprehensible to the spectator and has often caused the enthusiastic mathematician to be held in derision. A classic illustration is the example of Archimedes,....—Lampe, E.
Die Entwickelung der Mathematik, etc. (Berlin 1893), p. 22.
[1116]. Among the memoirs of Kirchhoff are some of uncommon beauty. Beauty, I hear you ask, do not the Graces flee where integrals stretch forth their necks? Can anything be beautiful, where the author has no time for the slightest external embellishment?... Yet it is this very simplicity, the indispensableness of each word, each letter, each little dash, that among all artists raises the mathematician nearest to the World-creator; it establishes a sublimity which is equalled in no other art,—something like it exists at most in symphonic music. The Pythagoreans recognized already the similarity between the most subjective and the most objective of the arts.... Ultima se tangunt. How expressive, how nicely characterizing withal is mathematics! As the musician recognizes Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert in the first chords, so the mathematician would distinguish his Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, Helmholtz in a few pages. Extreme external elegance, sometimes a somewhat weak skeleton of conclusions characterizes the French; the English, above all Maxwell, are distinguished by the greatest dramatic bulk. Who does not know Maxwell’s dynamic theory of gases? At first there is the majestic development of the variations of velocities, then enter from one side the equations of condition and from the other the equations of central motions,—higher and higher surges the chaos of formulas,—suddenly four words burst forth: “Put n = 5.” The evil demon V disappears like the sudden ceasing of the basso parts in music, which hitherto wildly permeated the piece; what before seemed beyond control is now ordered as by magic. There is no time to state why this or that substitution was made, he who cannot feel the reason may as well lay the book aside; Maxwell is no program-musician who explains the notes of his composition. Forthwith the formulas yield obediently result after result, until the temperature-equilibrium of a heavy gas is reached as a surprising final climax and the curtain drops....
Kirchhoff’s whole tendency, and its true counterpart, the form of his presentation, was different.... He is characterized by the extreme precision of his hypotheses, minute execution, a quiet rather than epic development with utmost rigor, never concealing a difficulty, always dispelling the faintest obscurity. To return once more to my allegory, he resembled Beethoven, the thinker in tones.—He who doubts that mathematical compositions can be beautiful, let him read his memoir on Absorption and Emission (Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Leipzig, 1882, p. 571-598) or the chapter of his mechanics devoted to Hydrodynamics.—Boltzmann, L.
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (Leipzig 1888), pp. 28-30.
On poetry and geometric truth,