[1918]. Every one versed in the matter will agree that even the elements of a scientific study of nature can be understood only by those who have a knowledge of at least the elements of the differential and integral calculus, as well as of analytical geometry—i.e. the so-called lower part of the higher mathematics.... We should raise the question, whether sufficient time could not be reserved in the curricula of at least the science high schools [Realanstalten] to make room for these subjects....
The first consideration would be to entirely relieve from the mathematical requirements of the university [Hochschule] certain classes of students who can get along without extended mathematical knowledge, or to make the necessary mathematical knowledge accessible to them in a manner which, for various reasons, has not yet been adopted by the university. Among such students I would count architects, also the chemists and in general the students of the so-called descriptive natural sciences. I am moreover of the opinion—and this has been for long a favorite idea of mine—, that it would be very useful to medical students to acquire such mathematical knowledge as is indicated by the above described modest limits; for it seems impossible to understand far-reaching physiological investigations, if one is terrified as soon as a differential or integration symbol appears.—Klein, F.
Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung, Bd. 2 (1902), p. 131.
[1919]. Common integration is only the memory of differentiation ... the different artifices by which integration is effected, are changes, not from the known to the unknown, but from forms in which memory will not serve us to those in which it will.—De Morgan, A.
Transactions Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 8 (1844), p. 188.
[1920]. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers a feeble outline of that intelligence, in the perfection which it has given to astronomy. Its discoveries in mechanics and in geometry, joined to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the world system.—Laplace.
Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, Introduction; Oeuvres, t. 7 (Paris, 1886), p. 6.
[1921]. There is perhaps the same relation between the action of natural selection during one generation and the accumulated result of a hundred thousand generations, that there exists between differential and integral. How seldom are we able to follow completely this latter relation although we subject it to calculation. Do we on that account doubt the correctness of our integrations?—Bois-Reymond, Emil du.
Reden, Bd. 1 (Leipzig, 1885), p. 228.