William Kingdon Clifford

Quotes

• “If God holds all mankind guilty for the sin of Adam, if he has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if he is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship him.”
• “We ought not to teach to little children, as a known fact, that which is not a known fact.”
• “There is in the true man of science a desire stronger than the wish to have his beliefs upheld; namely, the desire to have them true.”
• “The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.”
• “I am endeavouring in a general way to explain the laws of double refraction on this hypothesis, but have not yet arrived at any results sufficiently decisive to be communicated.”
• “Remember, then, that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself. And for this reason the question what its characters are... is the question of all questions for the human race.”

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Key facts

Born

4 May 1845 ( 1845-05-04 ) , Exeter , Devon, England

Died

3 March 1879 ( 1879-03-04 ) (aged 33), Madeira , Portugal

Alma mater

King's College London , Trinity College, Cambridge

Known for

Clifford algebra , Clifford's circle theorems , Clifford's theorem , Clifford torus , Clifford–Klein form , Clifford parallel , Bessel–Clifford function , Dual quaternion , Elements of Dynamic

Spouse

Lucy Clifford (1875–1879)

Institutions

University College London

Doctoral students

Arthur Black

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image

W. Kingdon Clifford.jpg

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