Top 100 Mathematics For Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
Charles Darwin
#3. It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#4. We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years, but new science has gotten rid of those absolutism, gotten forward other different logics of looking at mathematics, and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#5. There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#6. The only thing I am interested in using mathematics for is to have a good time and to help others do the same.
Paul Lockhart
#7. Bits also play a part in logic, that strange blend of philosophy and mathematics for which a primary goal is to determine whether certain statements are true or false. True
Charles Petzold
#8. We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore,
Richard Feynman
#9. Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.
Richard Bach
#10. Take chaotic mathematics, for instance. The universe is chaos. But chaos is whimping out. There is no chaos. There are just different levels of order in the universe.
Frederick Lenz
#12. In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.
Brian Greene
#13. I can only play the sport for so long, I have mathematics for the rest of my life.
John Urschel
#14. The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.
Richard P. Feynman
#15. The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.
Paul Krugman
#16. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
Nikola Tesla
#17. What I have said may serve to recommend mathematics for acquiring a vigorous constitution of mind; for which purpose they are as useful as exercise is for procuring health and strength to the body.
John Arbuthnot
#18. Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.
Frederick Seitz
#19. 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
#20. A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
Peter Thiel
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
T Bone Burnett
#24. For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Roger Bacon
#25. School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
Simone Weil
#26. And, most important of all," added the Mathemagician, "here is your own magic staff. Use it well and there is nothing it cannot do for you."
He placed in Milo's breast pocket a small gleaming pencil which, except for the size, was much like his own.
Norton Juster
#27. 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
#28. An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.
Lawrence R. Klein
#29. The understanding of mathematics is necessary for a sound grasp of ethics.
Socrates
#30. Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.
Andrew Wiles
#31. It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.
Cassiodorus
#32. In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.
Auguste Comte
#33. Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.
Yoko Ogawa
#34. There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.
Albert Einstein
#35. See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.
Charles Seife
#36. Cardinal arithmetic will be quite important for us, so we spend some time on it. Since, however, it tends to be trivial, we shall not need to spend much of this time on proofs.
Keith Devlin
#37. Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#38. I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#39. For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.
Freeman Dyson
#40. The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#41. As someone told me later, writing papers was the punishment we had to endure for the thrill of discovering new mathematics. This was the first time I was so punished.
Edward Frenkel
#42. The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.
Thomas Piketty
#43. Do you know why I love mathematics?"
"Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"
Eccles snorted in surprise. "Well, yes, but there's another reason.
Brendan Halpin
#44. Somewhere, within our brain, we have a potential for higher mathematics, complex physics, art, & amazing richness of thoughts, feelings & sensations Somewhere within our brain we have a potential to understand the Magic of Creative Thinking
Natasa Nuit Pantovic
#45. Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth.
Robinson Jeffers
#46. Fletcher shrugged. "Science and mathematics are all the rage, you know. But who has time for good old Horace?
Ashley Gardner
#47. As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5.
Bill Bryson
#48. My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#49. See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head! Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
Alexander Pope
#50. There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," said Purves. "That's the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn't have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.
David Byrne
#51. Most expert, skilled behavior works this way, whether it is playing tennis or a musical instrument, or doing mathematics and science. Experts minimize the need for conscious reasoning. Philosopher
Donald A. Norman
#52. 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
#53. For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?
Richard Courant
#54. I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
Tom Stoppard
#55. I tell you that studying humanities in high school is more important than mathematics - mathematics is too sharp an instrument, no good for kids.
Stefan Banach
#56. Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#57. For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.
M.C. Escher
#58. The study of mathematics is the indispensable basis for all intellectual and spiritual progress.
Francis Cornford
#59. Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.
Ann Patchett
#60. It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
H.L. Mencken
#61. 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
#62. Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.
Barbara Kingsolver
#63. I was a good student with mathematical ability and interests. As such, I took the usual college preparatory program in high school for one looking to become an engineer: all the available courses in mathematics and science.
Dale T. Mortensen
#64. Surely, the gods' judgment is certain. But as for us, we must be satisfied to 'come close' to those things, for we are men, who speak according to what is likely, and whose lectures resemble fables.
Proclus
#65. It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
George Bernard Shaw
#66. I confess, that very different from you, I do find sometimes scientific inspiration in mysticism ... but this is counterbalanced by an immediate sense for mathematics.
Wolfgang Pauli
#67. Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy
#68. Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
David Hilbert
#69. For the first time in his life, he decided to focus on his math homework.
Greg Pincus
#70. Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.
Franz Karl Achard
#71. University President: Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers ... and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers.
Isaac Asimov
#72. Art is a form of understanding like philosophy and science and mathematics are an understanding but the difference is that art has the capacity to hold all these different things. It is the form of understanding that is best suited for the contemporary time.
Robert Longo
#73. Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.
Arthur Cayley
#74. When the ancients discovered 'Phi', they were certain they had stumbled across God's building block for the world.
Dan Brown
#75. Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.
Paul Dirac
#77. Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.
Paul Erdos
#78. It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.
Andrew Wiles
#79. Examples ... which might be multiplied ad libitum, show how difficult it often is for an experimenter to interpret his results without the aid of mathematics.
John William Strutt
#80. Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.
Augustus De Morgan
#81. Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.
Peter Hoeg
#82. It's not only the myths surrounding chess. Chess itself is a myth, you know? A game of hierarchy, of war. It's a story that people have been using to explain complex concepts for eons. Mathematics, yes. Geometry. Business. Philosophy. Even love.
Skye Warren
#83. My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics. I'm not one of those people who can just spout off numbers for things, if numbers are thrown at me.
Brit Marling
#84. In high school I was good at math and everybody wanted me to do something with that - mathematics or engineering - which was a nightmare scenario for me. Meeting other artists and going to punk rock shows at that age, there was a feeling of freedom and community that I wanted to partake in.
Laura Owens
#85. When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.
Farkas Bolyai
#86. Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.
Aristotle.
#87. Not a few other very eminent and scholarly men made the same request, urging that I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#88. From the ages of five to twelve, I attended the Saint Laurence O'Toole elementary school in Lawrence, a city next to Methuen, and was taught by sisters of the Catholic order of Notre Dame de Namour. I enjoyed all my subjects there. I do not remember ever learning any science, except for mathematics.
Elias James Corey
#89. [Mathematics is] purely intellectual, a pure theory of forms, which has for its objects not the combination of quantities or their images, the numbers, but things of thought to which there could correspond effective objects or relations, even though such a correspondence is not necessary.
Hermann Hankel
#90. Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.
Elbert Hubbard
#91. As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.
James Joseph Sylvester
#92. For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Milan Kundera
#93. 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
#94. It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#95. She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.
Margaret Mitchell
#96. He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.
Alvaro De Campos
#97. Similarly for marking exercises, quantitative exercises, maybe not so much in mathematics, but certainly problem sets in physics, chemistry, and engineering and things like that where answers and methods are clear cut, absolutely. I would like to see that done online.
David Gelernter
#98. I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics.
John Lloyd
#99. Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.
George Polya
#100. The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps ...
Alexander Grothendieck
