Clippings

“The importance of scientific achievement is often not alone in the new material which is added to material already on hand,” Richard Courant has written. “Not less important for the progress of science can be an insight which brings order, simplicity and clarity into an existing but hard to reach area and thus facilitates or first makes possible the survey, comprehension and mastery of the science as a unified whole. …

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“For the analysis of a great mathematical talent,” [writes Otto Blumenthal], “One has to differentiate between the ability to create new concepts and the gift for sensing the depth of connections and simplifying fundamentals. Hilbert’s greatness consists in his overpowering, deep-penetrating insight. All of his works contain examples from far-flung fields, the inner relatedness of which and the connection with the problem at hand only he had been able to discern; from all these the synthesis – and his work of art – was ultimately created. As far as the creation of new things is concerned, I would place Minkowski higher, and from the classical great ones, for instance, Gauss, Galois, Riemann. But in his sense for discovering the synthesis only a very few of the great have equaled Hilbert.”