Mathematics What Quotes

#1. Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#2. There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

Raymond Louis Wilder

#3. Proofs are to mathematics what spelling (or even calligraphy) is to poetry. Mathematical works do consist of proofs, just as poems do consist of words.

V. I. Arnold

#4. The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

Bertrand Russell

#5. One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.

Bertrand Russell

#6. As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal; but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, or hours; they are equal in value. Then what is wanted is a unit of value to reckon by.

Isabel Paterson

#7. What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

John D. Barrow

#8. This concept is central to understanding what distinguishes the Arrowsmith approach: cognitive exercises do not teach content or skill in, say, mathematics; the aim is to forge new neural pathways in the brain so that later, when math is taught, number concepts actually make sense.

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young

#9. Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.

Ian Hacking

#10. Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#11. 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

#12. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant.

Laurent Schwartz

#13. What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.

David Eugene Smith

#14. Axiomatization is what one does last, it's rubbish. It's the hygiene of mathematics, axiomatization.

Serge Lang

#15. I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'

Nancy Roman

#16. This is not very important what I'm doing. I'm just proving something.

Richard P. Feynman

#17. What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

David Eugene Smith

#18. Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.

Bertrand Russell

#19. Your mathematics seem to me very like a bottle of mixed pickles the more you fish for what you want the less chance you have of getting it.

L. Frank Baum

#20. At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.

David Berlinski

#21. What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

James Sanborn

#22. Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.

Roger Bacon

#23. If you can't test it, it's not theorics
it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.

Neal Stephenson

#24. Much of what we know about mathematics and trade comes from the Arabs. Then came stagnation, and now they're the West's whipping boy. This is a problem that cannot be solved overnight, and certainly not militarily.

Brent Scowcroft

#25. You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

Marcus Du Sautoy

#26. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.

Malcolm Gladwell

#27. Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Albert J. Nock

#28. Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

Paul Auster

#29. Circles, homework coupons, what foolishness would she next hear? And so she began to teach him mathematics - she called it "maths" and he called it "math

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#30. What Is Mathematics? This question, if asked in earnest, has no answer.

Salomon Bochner

#31. I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

Simon Newcomb

#32. My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

Stephenie Meyer

#33. This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

Timothy Gowers

#34. What mathematics are to matter and force, occult science is to life and consciousness,

Dion Fortune

#35. No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Noam Chomsky

#36. I guess a sock is also a geometric shape - technically - but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?

Stephen King

#37. In mathematics, if a pattern occurs, we can go on to ask, Why does it occur? What does it signify? And we can find answers to these questions. In fact, for every pattern that appears, a mathematician feels he ought to know why it appears.

W.W. Sawyer

#38. 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

#39. The shared paradox of mathematics and ontology is that they speak of what lies behind every presentation without actually involving a presentation in the usual sense.

Anonymous

#40. Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

Howard Nemerov

#41. 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

#42. Every action of giving creates an opposite action of receiving and what you receive is always equal to what you've given. Whatever you give out in life, must return to you. It is the physics and the mathematics of the universe.

Rhonda Byrne

#43. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.

G.H. Hardy

#44. I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.

Brian Greene

#45. 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

#46. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful - 'important' if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and 'serious' expresses what I mean much better

G.H. Hardy

#47. What science can there be more noble, more excellent, more useful for men, more admirably high and demonstrative, than this of mathematics?

Benjamin Franklin

#48. Though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

Amelia Barr

#49. I feel that what mathematics needs least are pundits who issue prescriptions or guidelines for presumably less enlightened mortals.

Armand Borel

#50. Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

Aaron Sorkin

#51. To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be.

Leonhard Euler

#52. Mr S. got angry.
'Yes, I do have a son. He's a good-for-nothing. A dead loss.'
I couldn't ask which prison he was in, so I put it more tactfully: 'What is he doing?'
He sighed deeply: 'He's a professor of mathematics at London University.

George Mikes

#53. Mathematics is a world created by the mind of men, and mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!

Constance Reid

#54. Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions.

Felix Klein

#55. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.

Bret Easton Ellis

#56. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

Thomas Jefferson

#57. 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

#58. Companies want to innovate. Companies that don't innovate wither on the vine. The connection between STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and the financial stability of a nation is what needs to established.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#59. I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn't accept?

Dejan Stojanovic

#60. Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.

Richard P. Feynman

#61. 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

#62. I was reasonably interested in mathematics in school. Typically what happens is ... when you start playing chess, it takes up a lot of your attention. But about 10 years ago, I found that the Internet is very good to start learning about a lot of subjects.

Viswanathan Anand

#63. What would it be like, a world without snow? I cannot imagine such a place. It would be like a world devoid of numbers. Every snowflake, unique as every number, tells us something about complexity. Perhaps that is why we will never tire of its wonder.

Daniel Tammet

#64. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.

Carl Jung

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.

Andrew Lo

#68. Physical reality does not require that we be pleased with its mechanism; we must see the implications of a theory for what they are and not for what we would like them to be.

Kevin Michel

#69. Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bertrand Russell

#70. This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Roger Penrose

#71. Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.

Jordan Ellenberg

#72. What good is being a math genius if your life doesn't add up?

Marty Rubin

#73. I'd like to take some calculus, too. I have absolutely no ability in that direction and not much interest, either, but there's something going on in mathematics that I don't understand, and I'd like to find out what it is.

Andy Rooney

#74. Mathematics, you see, is not a spectator sport. To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean [to be] doing mathematics? In the first place, it means to be able to solve mathematical problems.

George Polya

#75. In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

Ronald Coase

#76. 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

#77. Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.

Vi Hart

#78. What comes, is called.

Ki Longfellow

#79. 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

#80. Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.

Matt Haig

#81. The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.

Mark Lawrence

#82. While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Stephen Hawking

#83. 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

#84. The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.

John Steinbeck

#85. What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?" My answer: "Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.

Tom Robbins

#86. 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

#87. Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

Lewis Carroll

#88. Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

William Adams

#89. In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.

Richard Hamming

#90. A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

Paul Dirac

#91. [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

#92. Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

Gottfried Leibniz

#93. Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

G.H. Hardy

#94. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

Bertrand Russell

#95. What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Stanislaw Ulam

#96. Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.

Israel Nathan Herstein

#97. White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.

Al Sharpton

#98. I love to look at you. I always think of what Gordon Prescott said. He said that you are God's perfect exercise in structural mathematics.

Ayn Rand

#99. It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

James Newman

#100. My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.

Alvin E. Roth