"Those who claim to discover everything but produce no proofs of the same may be confuted as having actually pretended to discover the impossible."
— Archimedes
Those Who Claim To Discover Everything
Those who claim to discover everything but produce no proofs of the same may be confuted as having actually pretended to discover the impossible.
About this quote
Archimedes wrote this criticism in the introduction to On Spirals (c. 225 BC), directed at mathematicians who claimed results they could not actually prove. The practice of announcing theorems without rigorous demonstration was a recognized problem in ancient Greek mathematics. Archimedes himself was scrupulous about proof, and his works in On the Sphere and Cylinder, On Conoids and Spheroids, and On Spirals set standards of mathematical rigor that were not surpassed for nearly two millennia.
Source
On Spirals, introduction
