Quotes

... as Sir Cyril Hinshelwood has observed ... fluid dynamicists were divided into hydraulic engineers who observed things that could not be explained and mathematicians who explained things that could not be observed.

- James Lighthill

... the progress of physics will to a large extent depend on the progress of nonlinear mathematics, of methods to solve nonlinear equations ... and therefore we can learn by comparing different nonlinear problems.

- Werner Heisenberg

Our present analytical methods seem unsuitable for the solution of the important problems arising in connection with nonlinear partial differential equations and, in fact, with virtually all types of nonlinear problems in pure mathematics. The truth of this statement is particularly striking in the field of fluid dynamics...

- John von Neumann

However varied may be the imagination of man, nature is a thousand times richer, ... Each of the theories of physics ... presents (partial differential) equations under a new aspect ... without these theories, we should not know partial differential equations.

- Henri Poincare

Since a general solution must be judged impossible from want of analysis, we must be content with the knowledge of some special cases, and that all the more, since the development of various cases seems to be the only way to bringing us at last to a more perfect knowledge.

- Leonard Euler