Henry John Stephen Smith

Quotes

• “We must confine ourselves to what we may term the great highways of the science; and... we must wholly pass by many outlying researches of great interest and importance, as we propose rather to exhibit in a clear light the most fundamental and indispensable theories, than to embarrass the treatment of a subject, already sufficiently complex, with a multitude of details, which, however important in themselves, are not essential to the comprehension of the whole.”
• “The problem of the direct determination of the primitive roots of a prime number is one of the 'cruces' of the Theory of Numbers. Euler, who first observed the peculiarity of these numbers, has yet left us no rigorous proof of their existence; though assuming their existence, he succeeded in accurately determining their number. The defect in his demonstration was first supplied by Gauss, who has also proposed an indirect method for finding a primitive root.”
• “The first demonstration (Disq. Arith., Arts. 125-145) which is presented by Gauss in a form very repulsive to any but the most laborious students, has been resumed by Lejeune Dirichlet in a memoir in Crelle's Journal... and has been developed by him with that luminous perspicuity by which his mathematical writings are distinguished.”
• “In those days he was almost equally a lover of Classics and Mathematics. ...Even in the last years of his life he was in the habit of taking with him Greek books to read during the Vacation.”
• “His mathematical speculations could have been shared by a very few, not more than two or three, of his contemporaries at Oxford. Yet he did not withdraw himself from business or society. He was not the silent philosopher who is lost in reverie, or who, while acknowledged to be a mathematical genius, is pointed at by mankind as a poor and eccentric mortal. He was a thorough man of the world and greatly liked by everybody.”
• “He was indulgent to the failings of young men, and felt a humane pity for persons who had lost their character. He was one of whom it might be said that 'he would have stood by a friend, not only in adversity, but in disgrace.'”

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