horizon and point of view

David Hilbert is credited with a quip: sometimes a person’s horizon shrinks like a circle with an ever smaller radius until it becomes a point—and that point becomes their “point of view.” Biographer Constance Reid reports the line in *Hilbert–Courant* (1984, p. 174). Since this is an aphorism relayed in a biography rather than a located primary record of Hilbert speaking or writing it, the attribution is best treated as biographical, not independently documented. The illustration is AI-generated.