Quote:
Originally Posted by hhEb09'1
BTW, this is an interesting quote, maybe even on topic  I looked around, and some webpages say it is unsourced, others say it appears in Carl Seelig's book Albert Einstein. Does anybody know the context in that book, if it does appear there? |
I can't say anything about that book or the context of the quote, but from other Einstein quotes, I think he was being facetious. He has one quote where he says he understood relativity until the mathematicians got ahold of it, and another where he claims to be a worse mathematician than almost anyone. Yet he also has quotes where he recognizes how crucial mathematics is to science, and of course he relied on calculus and analytic geometry extensively. So I think he likes to poke fun at how mathematicians change the sound of everything to embed it in a much more abstract space than physicists are used to, but he knows how much physics relies on mathematics.