Rigorously Quotes
More Rigorously Quotes
The function just found cannot, it is true, express rigorously the probabilities of the errors: for since the possible errors are in all cases confined within certain limits, the probability of errors exceeding those limits ought always to be zero, while our formula always gives some value. However, this defect, which every analytical function must, from its nature, labor under, is of no importance in practice, because the value of our function decreases so rapidly... that it can safely be considered as vanishing. Besides, the nature of the subject never admits of assigning with absolute rigor the limits of error.
carl friedrich gauss— Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (1857)
Your President is now the Tribune of the people, and, thank God, I am, and intend to assert the power which the people have placed in me... Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigorously, more vigorously, and more severely, than by one.
andrew johnson— As quoted in Presidential Government in the United States: The Unwritten Constitution (1947) by Caleb Perry Patterson
There are very few things that can be proved rigorously in condensed matter physics.
anthony james leggett— Nobel Lecture, December 8, 2003.
It is not until science has become a discipline to which the research ability of any mind from any class in society can be attracted that it can become rigorously scientific
Margaret Mead— p.406 (Growing Up in New Guinea, 1930)
The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay that is, nonacademic interest in reading it.
— Russell Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), pp. 5-6
Each potential infinite, if it is rigorously applicable mathematically, presupposes an actual infinite.
— Georg Cantor, in "Über die verschiedenen Ansichten in Bezug auf die actualunendlichen Zahlen" ["Over the different views with regard to the actual infinite numbers"] - Bihand Till Koniglen Svenska Vetenskaps Akademiens Handigar (1886)
I am for a government rigorously frugal & simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers & salaries merely to make partisans, & for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of it's being a public blessing.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, reported in ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Paul L. Ford, vol. 7, p. 327 (1896).
While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
— Edward Lasker, attributed by the American Go Association[1]
