Top 100 Math Mathematics Quotes
#1. Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.
Edward Kasner
#2. In the online math class, there was almost no meaningful student/teacher or student/student interaction. To equate this type of online learning with a real-world classroom experience is a major stretch.
Ian Lamont
#3. Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
Charles Darwin
#4. It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
#5. The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.
George Polya
#6. Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.
Henry Hallett Dale
#7. Mathematics is one of the surest ways for a man to feel the power of thought and the magic of the spirit. Mathematics is one of the eternal truths and, as such, raises the spirit to the same level on which we feel the presence of God.
Julio Cesar De Mello E Souza
#9. Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
Carl Benjamin Boyer
#10. Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
#11. You're probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone's better at math than I am, but it's okay, I'm fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things - guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few.
Jennifer Niven
#12. Monty Jones: Dad, is there a word to describe answers that are completely correct but entirely useless under the circumstances?
Professor Jones: Yes, yes there is.
David Morgan-Mar
#13. No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?
Paul Lockhart
#14. If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
Vannevar Bush
#15. Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#16. Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
Edward Teller
#17. Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
Lord Kelvin
#18. Mathematics is the only instructional material that can be presented in an entirely undogmatic way.
Max Dehn
#19. A typical mathematician does not actively try to be useful. Individual mathematicians are motivated primarily by a subtle mixture of ambition and intellectual curiosity, and not by a wish to benefit society, nevertheless, mathematics as a whole does benefit society.
Timothy Gowers
#20. Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.
Simeon Denis Poisson
#21. In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
Albert Einstein
#22. I engage in the use of game theory. Game theory is a branch of mathematics, and that means, sorry, that even in the study of politics, math has come into the picture. We can no longer pretend that we just speculate about politics; we need to look at this in a rigorous way.
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
#23. To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it.
Catherine Asaro
#24. The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.
Carl Gustav Hempel
#25. The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.
Rudy Rucker
#26. As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster.
Haruki Murakami
#27. Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.
George Polya
#28. Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#29. All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other, and all means of discovering them are equally admissible.
Adrien-Marie Legendre
#30. Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.
Vi Hart
#31. We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
Andrew Wiles
#32. [As a young teenager] Galois read Legendre]'s geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.
Eric Temple Bell
#33. [I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
G.H. Hardy
#34. If men had known how to permeate the soul with mathematics in the right way in the arithmetic lessons during these past years, we should not now have Bolshevism in Eastern Europe.
Rudolf Steiner
#36. The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience
Immanuel Kant
#37. Mathematics is the Life of the Gods.
Novalis
#38. Infinity ... is used in physics simply as a shorthand for a very big number.
Victor J. Stenger
#39. Mathematics is the gate and key to science.
Roger Bacon
#40. They shouldn't be allowed to teach math so early in the morning.
Kendare Blake
#41. I love mathematics ... principally because it is beautiful; because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game the encompassing of the infinite.
Rozsa Peter
#42. I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.
Douglas Coupland
#43. Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.
Charles Hermite
#44. The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
Edward Gibbon
#45. Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.
Yuri Manin
#46. ahh, calculus. the mathematics of change
Nicola Yoon
#47. If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics ...
Roger Bacon
#48. Music was not so very different from mathematics. It was all just patterns and sequences. The only difference was that they hung in the air instead of on a piece of paper. Dancing was a grand equation. One side was sound, the other movement. The dancer's job was to make them equal.
Julia Quinn
#49. This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.
Eric Temple Bell
#50. There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else
but persistent.
Raoul Bott
#51. 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
#52. I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower
Jacqueline Carey
#53. It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tend to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.
Terry Pratchett
#54. "The most powerful single idea in mathematics is the notion of a variable."
Alexander Dewdney
#55. Mathematics - this may surprise or shock some - is never deductive in creation.
Paul Halmos
#56. The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#57. The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.
Plato
#58. Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
John Polkinghorne
#59. We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
Mark Twain
#60. The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#61. Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.
Joseph Fourier
#62. Patience is my virtue, but only in Math, Daddy, - Ashley
Ryanne Salve
#63. If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy) ...
Doug Pierce
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. What good is being a math genius if your life doesn't add up?
Marty Rubin
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.
Tobias Dantzig
#74. Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself.
Claude Fayette Bragdon
#75. 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
#76. Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.
Edward Frenkel
#77. As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
#78. I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
Werner Heisenberg
#79. It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts.
Paul Halmos
#80. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
#82. I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between.
George Polya
#83. Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.
Frank Plumpton Ramsey
#84. [Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.
Paul Lockhart
#85. The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood.
K. Martin Beckner
#86. You get surreal numbers by playing games. I used to feel guilty in Cambridge that I spent all day playing games, while I was supposed to be doing mathematics. Then, when I discovered surreal numbers, I realized that playing games IS math.
John Horton Conway
#87. As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.
William Thurston
#88. Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
Plato
#89. 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.
#90. Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
G.H. Hardy
#91. Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments.
W.H. Newton-Smith
#92. Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?
Paul Lockhart
#93. The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing.
[Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862]
Rudolf Clausius
#94. All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
Martin Gardner
#95. If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living, - then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
#96. A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.
Howard Whitley Eves
#97. It will be another million years, at least, before we understand the primes.
Paul Erdos
#98. And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics.
William Joyce
#99. But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of Hilbert, we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they had better lead to something interesting.
Julian Coolidge
#100. If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
Henri Poincare
