Mathematician Quotes

#1. It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw.

Augustus De Morgan

#2. ... 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

#3. 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

#4. In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.

Henri Lebesgue

#5. Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.

Steven G. Krantz

#6. The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

George Henry Lewes

#7. It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Aristotle.

#8. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Storm Jameson

#9. Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#10. I'm a mathematician by education, but I have this other thing. A gut instinct.

Glen Taylor

#11. The library is the mathematician's laboratory.

Paul Halmos

#12. 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

#13. A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.

Bill Gaede

#14. The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

Ernst Mach

#15. I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Plato

#16. The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

Alfred Adler

#17. How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

W. H. Auden

#18. I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.

Alan Greenspan

#19. Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one; and most of the finest products of an applied mathematician's fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have been created, for the brutal but sufficient reason that they do not fit the facts.

G.H. Hardy

#20. The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman.

Francois Arago

#21. It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

Sofia Kovalevskaya

#22. So on we tramped, three small dots on a big mountain, mere specks, beings of no importance. In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

Ruskin Bond

#23. I am a mathematician and I can confidently say that the best figure ever produced is your phone number.

Amit Kalantri

#24. Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination.

Leonard Koppett

#25. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

Paul Dirac

#26. I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

David Chalmers

#27. [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

Henry Adams

#28. Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

Alfred Adler

#29. Charlie's not your conventional mathematician ... we sexed him up a little bit.

David Krumholtz

#30. The whole thing that makes a mathematician's life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

Donald Knuth

#31. There's nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right to your face.

Marjorie Benton Cooke

#32. I have created a new universe from nothing.

Janos Bolyai

#33. Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.

Isabel Paterson

#34. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#35. The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

Havelock Ellis

#36. An Engineer rounds numbers based on the system behaviour and a Mathematician or a Schoolkid does it based on a pedagogical rule.

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#37. I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

Benoit Mandelbrot

#38. The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Clifford Geertz

#39. I was really quite geeky at school. At one point, I wanted to be prime minister or a mathematician.

Bel Powley

#40. Puzzles are made of the things that the mathematician, no less than the child, plays with, and dreams and wonders about, for they are made of things and circumstances of the world he [or she] live in.

Edward Kasner

#41. 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

#42. On completing my degree, I started a Ph.D. in statistics, although I knew very little about the topic. My supervisor was Professor Harry Pitt, who was an excellent pure mathematician and probabilist.

Clive Granger

#43. No mathematician of equal stature has risen from our generation ... Hilbert was singularly free from national and racial prejudices; in all public questions, be they political, social or spiritual, he stood forever on the side of freedom.

Hermann Weyl

#44. When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask.

Paul Halmos

#45. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.

Rachel Sklar

#46. About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I loved and felt that I was good at.

Deborah Mailman

#47. The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.

William Poundstone

#48. Slim and neatly groomed, he looked like a really sexy mathematician unaware that he was a prime number. I wanted to unbutton his shirt, muss his hair, and exclaim, Good heavens, Professor Dracula, you're stunning!

Marta Acosta

#49. Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#50. The mathematician knows some things, no doubt, but not those things one usually wants to get from him.

Albert Einstein

#51. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#52. Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

G.H. Hardy

#53. Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

Gian-Carlo Rota

#54. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe

Paul Dirac

#55. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?

Erich Maria Remarque

#56. If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

Paul Dirac

#57. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.

Vincent Buranelli

#58. The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful.

Jules Henri Poincare

#59. The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

Karl Pearson

#60. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

Scarlett Thomas

#61. A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#62. Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.

Hermann Weyl

#63. A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

Bill Gaede

#64. The mathematics of Malthus? A quick Internet search led him to information about a prominent nineteenth-century English mathematician and demographist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who had famously predicted an eventual global collapse due to overpopulation.

Dan Brown

#65. As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

Edgar Allan Poe

#66. It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

Steven Weinberg

#67. Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

Jack Edmonds

#68. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at [fetal development] with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us?

Alexander Tsiaras

#69. Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays.

Philip J. Davis

#70. The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God.

J. W. N. Sullivan

#71. You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'

Catherine Hardwicke

#72. A mathematician is always asking, "What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?

Jordan Ellenberg

#73. To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.

Bertrand Russell

#74. So each one of you agrees to disagree with whatever the other one agrees with, but if you both disagree with the same thing, aren't you really in agreement?

Norton Juster

#75. 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

#76. Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, he said: I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.

Edmund Landau

#77. One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems.

Thomas Little Heath

#78. Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

Catherynne M Valente

#79. I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

Whitfield Diffie

#80. The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.

Francis Bacon

#81. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Norbert Wiener

#82. A mathematician," he liked to say, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Mason Currey

#83. Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Eddington

#84. Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

Hermann Hesse

#85. 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

#86. It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

Aristotle.

#87. The desire to explore thus marks out the mathematician. This is one of the forces making for the growth of mathematics. The mathematician enjoys what he already knows; he is eager for more knowledge.

W.W. Sawyer

#88. I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics," Darger said. "She is, in either case, ravishing.

Michael Swanwick

#89. 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

#90. It is easier to square a circle than to get round a mathematician.

Augustus De Morgan

#91. The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

George Bernard Shaw

#92. Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

Noam Chomsky

#93. To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: "the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.

Oswald Spengler

#94. If you experience this feeling once, you will want to go back and do it again. This was the first time it happened to me, and like the first kiss, it was very special. I knew then that I could call myself mathematician.

Edward Frenkel

#95. The mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence.

Hans Reichenbach

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. Hilbert once had a student in mathematics who stopped coming to his lectures, and he was finally told the young man had gone off to become a poet. Hilbert is reported to have remarked: 'I never thought he had enough imagination to be a mathematician.'

George Polya

#99. I knew a mathematician who said 'I do not know as much as God. But I know as much as God knew at my age'.

Milton Shulman

#100. A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

Karl Weierstrass