Top 31 Mathematical Physics Quotes
#1. Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.
Peter Debye
#3. The next grand extensions of mathematical physics will, in all likelihood, be furnished by quaternions.
Peter Tait
#4. Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
Nathan Myhrvold
#5. The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.
John Von Neumann
#6. A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
John B. S. Haldane
#7. The aim of Mathematical Physics is not only to facilitate for the physicist the numerical calculation of certain constants or the integration of certain differential equations. It is besides, it is above all, to reveal to him the hidden harmony of things in making him see them in a new way.
Henri Poincare
#8. I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology.
Frederick Reines
#9. It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.
Mark Kac
#10. This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#11. It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling, you can show the relationship.
Richard P. Feynman
#12. A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.
Paul Dirac
#13. Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject.
Harold Morowitz
#14. A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.
Bill Gaede
#15. All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics.
Ashim Shanker
#16. A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.
Bill Gaede
#17. Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.
Bill Gaede
#18. But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles.
Lee Smolin
#19. The great problem of today is, how to subject all physical phenomena to dynamical laws. With all the experimental devices, and all the mathematical appliances of this generation, the human mind has been baffled in its attempts to construct a universal science of physics.
Joseph Lovering
#20. At every major step, physics has required, and frequently stimulated, the introduction of new mathematical tools and concepts. Our present understanding of the laws of physics, with their extreme precision and universality, is only possible in mathematical terms.
Michael Atiyeh
#21. Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.
Bill Gaede
#22. If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).
Benoit Mandelbrot
#23. The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
Paul Dirac
#24. Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.
Paul Davies
#25. 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
#26. Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.
Michael Crichton
#27. I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.
Paul Dirac
#28. College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.
Bill Gaede
#29. Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Bertrand Russell
#30. A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
Bill Gaede
#31. Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.
Stephen Hawking
