Top 100 Mathematician Quotes
#1. A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.
J.Williard Gibbs
#2. A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.
Stefan Banach
#3. Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician.
Jerry Buss
#4. The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.
Thomas Paine
#5. Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. A good quant must be a mixture, too - part trader, part salesperson, part programmer, and part mathematician.
Emanuel Derman
#7. A mathematician would hardly call a correspondence between the set of 64 triples of four units and a set of twenty other units, "universal", while such correspondence is, probably, the most fundamental general feature of life on Earth.
Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov
#8. I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
Freeman Dyson
#9. A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.
Ludwig Boltzmann
#10. Perhaps ... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.
Antoine Lavoisier
#11. Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
Andre Weil
#12. Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.
Marston Morse
#13. Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.
Arthur Eddington
#14. The computer was, to the best of my feelings about the subject, not thinking like a mathematician, and it was much more successful, because it was thinking not like a mathematician.
Kenneth Appel
#15. What is the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher?
A mathematician uses a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.
The philosopher needs only the pencil and paper.
Matthew Rave
#16. The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.
Joel Henry Hildebrand
#17. Our existence here, he says, is a case of "not we the accidental but we the expected." Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.
Kevin Kelly
#18. My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.
David Chalmers
#19. A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
Charles Darwin
#20. A philosopher is a mathematician, who might not be good at solving mathematical problems but knows 'which one' to solve and 'why' to solve it...
Victor Ghoshe
#21. A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic ...
Bill Gaede
#22. A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician .
Charles Sanders Peirce
#23. The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.
Gosta Mittag-Leffler
#24. In India, I learned a proverb that says, 'Distrust the calculation seven times over, the mathematician a hundred times.'
Julio Cesar De Mello E Souza
#25. It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.
Bertrand Russell
#26. A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory.
Paul Erdos
#27. The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof, but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by GUESSING.
George Polya
#28. Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.'
Graham Moore
#30. That's my mathematician who examines problems which I put before him and checks their validity. You see, I am not myself a good mathematician.
Albert Einstein
#32. To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy.
Frederick The Great
#33. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Seneca.
#34. The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not.
James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
#35. Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.
William Poundstone
#36. The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying.
Jean Dieudonne
#37. Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
Eric Kandel
#38. One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.
Norbert Wiener
#39. It is a common public relations gimmick to give the entire credit for the solution of famous problems to the one mathematician who is responsible for the last step.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#40. I have written a book called 'In the Wonderland of Numbers.' It's about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician.
Shakuntala Devi
#41. This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The
Steven Pinker
#42. The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.
James Joseph Sylvester
#43. Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books?
J. Arthur Thomson
#45. A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#46. The Canadian-Australian mathematician Norman Wildberger has posted an essay arguing that real numbers are a joke.
Max Tegmark
#47. Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.
Hermann Hankel
#48. The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.
James C. Maxwell
#49. My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.
James Arthur
#50. The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra
#51. Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission.
Blaise Pascal
#52. To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
George Bernard Shaw
#53. Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#54. Von Neumann, by contrast, wore a three-piece suit at almost all times, including on a donkey ride down the Grand Canyon; even as a student he was so well dressed that, upon first meeting him, the mathematician David Hilbert reportedly had but one question: Who is his tailor?45
Walter Isaacson
#55. This is a question too difficult for a mathematician. It should be asked of a philosopher(when asked about completing his income tax form)
Albert Einstein
#57. He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.
{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss}
Niels Henrik Abel
#58. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
#59. Few rounds....
I am damn good mathematician!
2 999 999 999 999 999 999 + 11 999 999 999 999 999 999 = 14 999 999 999 999 999 998.
Deyth Banger
#60. No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
Jacques Derrida
#61. When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
Mark Haddon
#63. A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse - not a remarkable mathematician.
Warren Buffett
#64. As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word beautiful.
Norman Maclean
#65. I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.
John Pople
#66. The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
Midhat Gazale
#67. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.
Henri Poincare
#68. I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.
Graham Moore
#69. If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.
G.H. Hardy
#70. I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
Stephen Sondheim
#71. A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a "solution" and creates a problem.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#72. Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#73. I must admit that outside the university, it is difficult to be a pure mathematician. No one in my family understands what I do. My neighbors wonder why I spend all my time in my study scribbling with pencil on a yellow pad of paper instead of going outside to mow the lawn.
Isadore Singer
#74. What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it's fun to try to learn some of the secrets.
Paul Halmos
#75. I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."
Michael Loceff
#76. I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.
John Hurt
#78. Safety warning: never divide by zero unless a licensed mathematician is present.
Jordan Ellenberg
#79. Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
G.H. Hardy
#80. Oh God, she could see it now - the police constable filling out a report: Mathematician drowned due to miscalculation.
Nina Rowan
#81. You can pay attention to the fact, in which case you'll probably become a mathematician, or you can ignore it, in which case you'll probably become a physicist.
Len Evans
#82. From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
James Jeans
#83. Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#84. In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
#85. I'm no mathematician, so I'm stuck with the graphic representations.
Hugh Hopper
#86. A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician.
Brahmagupta
#87. I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.
Steven Strogatz
#88. It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.
Karl Weierstrass
#89. I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be.
David Lagercrantz
#90. Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.
Gottlob Frege
#91. Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.
Kenneth E. Iverson
#92. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.
Stefan Banach
#94. Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure.....Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician.
Charles Sorel
#95. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.
Steven Levy
#96. "I am not much of a mathematician," said the cigarette, "but I can add to a man's nervous troubles, I can subtract from his physical energy, I can multiply his aches and pains, I can divide his mental powers, I take interest from his work, and discount his chances for success."
David Starr Jordan
#97. The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.
G.H. Hardy
#98. Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.
E. T. Bell
#99. A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
G.H. Hardy
#100. The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.
John Von Neumann
