Top 100 Best Mathematics Quotes
#1. The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#2. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful - 'important' if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and 'serious' expresses what I mean much better
G.H. Hardy
#3. The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and 'pure geometries' are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.
G.H. Hardy
#5. Somebody came up to me after a talk I had given, and say, "You make mathematics seem like fun." I was inspired to reply, "If it isn't fun, why do it?"
Ralph P. Boas Jr.
#6. I didn't want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn't want to do a thing doesn't mean they ought to shirk.
Catherynne M Valente
#7. Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.
Mary Everest Boole
#8. I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.
Benjamin Moser
#9. All I know, all I can comprehend of the mathematics of a life, are the times your hand is inside my hand, and the times it is not.
Tyler Knott Gregson
#10. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.
Louise Bourgeois
#11. Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.
George Smoot
#12. Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself.
Claude Fayette Bragdon
#13. Any argument where one supposes an arbitrary choice to be made an uncountably infinite number of times ... [is] outside the domain of mathematics.
Emile Borel
#14. It always amazed Vimes how Nobby got along with practically everyone. It must, he'd decided, have something to do with the common denominator. In the entire world of mathematics there could be no denominator as common as Nobby.
Terry Pratchett
#15. If you had done something twice, you are likely to do it again.
Brian Kernighan
#16. Lisp ... made me aware that software could be close to executable mathematics.
L Peter Deutsch
#17. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!
Paul Lockhart
#18. The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.
Immanuel Kant
#19. One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
Paul Wolfowitz
#20. People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?
Matt Haig
#21. That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.
Imre Lakatos
#22. Mathematics was hard, dull work. Geography pleased me more. For dancing I was quite enthusiastic.
John James Audubon
#23. Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.
Tobias Dantzig
#24. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.
Margaret Wertheim
#25. I might not be all that good with mathematics in class; but go into my mind; and you will see that type of mathematic I put in; in my everyday life, and you can say that I am genius in a way in the terms of mentality; but retarded in class.
Temitope Owosela
#27. A peculiarity of the higher arithmetic is the great difficulty which has often been experienced in proving simple general theorems which had been suggested quite naturally by numerical evidence.
Harold Davenport
#28. Plato found mathematics very absorbing because mathematical states never change.
Jostein Gaarder
#29. [The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.
Albert Einstein
#30. When she was in the middle of a hack, it tended to fill up her brain until her vision hummed with coding and mathematics, skipping ahead to each necessary task faster than she could complete them. It tended to leave her in a state of drained euphoria.
Marissa Meyer
#31. I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.
Shakuntala Devi
#32. Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?
Arthur C. Clarke
#34. A straight line is the shortest possible line between any two points - an axiom equally true in morals as in mathematics.
Maria Edgeworth
#35. Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.
Robert Langlands
#36. At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#37. I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form.
Agnes Denes
#38. I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
Carl Sandburg
#39. Mathematics is the surest way to immortality. If you make a big discovery in mathematics, you will be remembered after everyone else will be forgotten
Paul Erdos
#40. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#41. Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
Hermann Hesse
#42. Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.
Richard Hamming
#44. In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.
Ronald Coase
#45. Mathematics, you see, is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean [to be] doing mathematics? In the first place, it means to be able to solve mathematical problems.
George Polya
#46. I'd like to take some calculus, too. I have absolutely no ability in that direction and not much interest, either, but there's something going on in mathematics that I don't understand, and I'd like to find out what it is.
Andy Rooney
#47. I had a polynomial once. My doctor removed it.
Michael Grant
#48. Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums
Michael Frayn
#49. Mathematics is not a separate entity. It owes a great deal of its power and its beauty to other disciplines.
Mark Kac
#50. When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#51. The basis for comprehension is theory, and the language of theoretical science is mathematics.
D.C. Rapaport
#52. Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.
David Chalmers
#53. There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#54. There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.
Thomas Merton
#55. Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.
David Quammen
#56. 'Without the help of mathematics,' the wise man continued, 'the art could not advance and all the sciences would perish.'
Julio Cesar De Mello E Souza
#59. My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.
Robert C. Merton
#60. One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.
Brian Greene
#61. Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy.
Seth Shostak
#62. Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#63. The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.
Georg Cantor
#64. I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.
Clive Granger
#65. It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.
Stanislaw Ulam
#66. Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.
Alfred North Whitehead
#67. I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous, which is acting, and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics, and I think math is the cat's meow.
Danica McKellar
#68. There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.
Archimedes
#69. Mathematics are one of the fundamentaries of educationalizing our youth.
George W. Bush
#70. What good is being a math genius if your life doesn't add up?
Marty Rubin
#72. Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.
Hermann Weyl
#73. Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.
Jordan Ellenberg
#74. In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Andre Weil
#75. Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
#76. Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
C.V. Wedgwood
#77. We can ... treat only the geometrical aspects of mathematics and shall be satisfied in having shown that there is no problem of the truth of geometrical axioms and that no special geometrical visualization exists in mathematics.
Hans Reichenbach
#78. His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life.
Irvine Welsh
#79. My elementary education was at Christ Church infant school and St. Stephen's junior school. At St. Stephen's, I encountered my first real mentor, the headmaster Mr. Broakes. He must have spotted something unusual in me, for he spent lots of time encouraging my interest in mathematics.
Richard J. Roberts
#80. This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.
Roger Penrose
#81. Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience.
Keith Devlin
#82. Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.
Johannes Kepler
#83. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#84. The language of mathematics, scientific observations, and our perceptivity together knit the window to reality.
Neeti Sinha
#85. My feelings about politics and literature and mathematics and the rest of life's minutiae can only be described through a labyrinthine of six-sided questions, but everything that actually matters can be explained by Lindsey fucking Buckingham and Stevie fucking Nicks in four fucking minutes.
Chuck Klosterman
#86. But my relief that David Auburn's Proof is less about its ballyhooed higher mathematics than the fragility of life and love was matched by my delight in his fine and tender play. ( ... ) Proof surprises us with its aliveness and intelligent modesty, and we have not met these characters before.
John Heilpern
#87. The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it.
James Newman
#88. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
G.H. Hardy
#89. The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.
Maimonides
#90. A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
Bill Gaede
#91. Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories.
Raymond Louis Wilder
#92. Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
Iris Murdoch
#93. From now on whenever I read a math book, I'm going to try to figure out by myself how everything was done, before looking at the solution. Even if I don't figure it out, I think I'll be able to see the beauty of a proof then.
Donald E. Knuth
#94. Well, I was always ... I used to get 100% in physics and chemistry and mathematics (well, maybe a couple of points off in mathematics), and that was in high school.
James Doohan
#95. Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?
Jim Holt
#96. There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.
Geoffrey Wood
#97. To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples ...
John B. Conway
#98. If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy) ...
Doug Pierce
#99. Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
Robert Musil
#100. Patience is my virtue, but only in Math, Daddy, - Ashley
Ryanne Salve
