Quotations by Serge Lang

The problems of financing the universities and their intellectual freedom, threatened by political and bureaucratic interference, are problems which are invariant under the ism transformations: socialism, communism, capitalism, or any other ism or ology.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

The only goal of science is the honour of the human spirit, and a question in number theory is worth a question concerning the system of the world.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

Axiomatization is what one does last, it's rubbish. It's the hygiene of mathematics, axiomatization.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

JOC/EFR August 2010

The URL of this page is:
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Quotations/Lang.html