Top 100 Quotes About Mathematicians
#1. As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.
Abraham Robinson
#2. 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
#3. Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#4. Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by
themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for
ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit.
Eric Temple Bell
#5. It is not the job of mathematicians ... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.
Samuil Shatunovsky
#6. The mathematicians of this world regard themselves as 'physicists,' yet they know next to nothing about Physics.
Bill Gaede
#7. Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so lone as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant; they are interested in form only.
Henri Poincare
#8. The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.
Simon Singh
#9. The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
#10. Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
Edsger Dijkstra
#11. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
Tom Lehrer
#12. Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.
Walter Isaacson
#13. I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.
Jordan Ellenberg
#14. On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.
Brian Patten
#16. Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.
Morris Kline
#17. Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.
David Foster Wallace
#18. [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.
Henry Adams
#19. 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
#20. Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.
Andrew Wiles
#21. Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#22. Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is
so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
Robert A. Heinlein
#23. Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
Honore De Balzac
#24. Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it's true. Otherwise, we won't know anything at all.
Ian Stewart
#25. 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
#26. All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
Martin Gardner
#27. (Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians ... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies ... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#28. Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
Albert Einstein
#29. Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.
Richard P. Gabriel
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.
Andrew Wiles
#34. 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
#35. Work/Loaf Ratio" ... I have spent fourteen years perfecting ... I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of the "W/LR" save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos.
Gary Reilly
#36. Mathematicians grow very old; it is a healthy profession. The reason you live long is that you have pleasant thoughts. Math and physics are very pleasant things to do.
Dirk Jan Struik
#38. 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
#39. [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#40. It is cheaper to pay mathematicians and computer scientists to design algorithms that will eliminate webspamming, rather than to pay lawyers to do lawsuits.
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#41. 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
#42. If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.
Susan Jacoby
#43. "Do you know," the Devil confided, "not even the best mathematicians on other planets - all far ahead of yours - have solved it? Why, there is a chap on Saturn - he looks something like a mushroom on stilts - who solves partial differential equations mentally; and even he's given up."
Arthur Porges
#44. Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science ... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.
Aristotle.
#45. 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
#46. Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.
Jack Edmonds
#47. The feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know
Henri Poincare
#48. Mathematicians boast of their exacting achievements, but in reality they are absorbed in mental acrobatics and contribute nothing to society.
Ogyu Sorai
#49. Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
Terry Pratchett
#50. In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
Albert Einstein
#51. 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
#52. Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.
Graham Greene
#53. If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Paul Halmos
#54. Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.
James Jeans
#55. 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
#56. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.
G.H. Hardy
#57. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At
Paul Graham
#58. I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.
Andrew Wiles
#59. For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.
Henri Poincare
#60. One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists' war, World War II was the physicists' war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians' war.
Philip J. Davis
#61. It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.
Virginia Woolf
#62. The only reason psychology students don't have to do more and harder mathematics than physics students is because the mathematicians haven't yet discovered ways of dealing with problems as hard as those in psychology.
John G. Kemeny
#63. Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.
Charles Krauthammer
#64. Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#65. The Priests are famous mathematicians; they can demonstrate that one is equal to three, or that three equals one; three eternals is equal to one eternal, and one holy equal to three holies!
Philanthropos
#66. We need scientists and mathematicians explaining why they are excited about their subjects but also why they are important for solving social problems, informing political debate and for the economy.
Marcus Du Sautoy
#67. Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.
Charles Hermite
#68. It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
Daniel Bernoulli
#69. Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#72. Theoretical Computer Science is just as useless as everything we mathematicians do.
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#73. The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.
Alonzo Church
#74. You know we all became mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy.
Maxwell Rosenlicht
#75. Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change.
Edsger Dijkstra
#76. Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.
Margaret Wertheim
#77. You are utterly incorrect ... How many irate mathematicians are needed to get you to change your mind?
Anonymous
#78. Mathematicians use intuition, conjecture and guesswork all the time except when they are in the classroom.
Joseph Warren
#79. Pointing out that countless great mathematicians had tried to solve the problem and failed before you came along is in particularly bad taste and should be avoided completely.
Terence Tao
#80. [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
#81. People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly through annoying industrial noise.
Edward Frenkel
#82. A result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs.
The Nature of Mathematics
Max Black
#83. Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.
Blaise Pascal
#84. Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
#85. Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#86. True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.
David O. McKay
#87. In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.
William Stanley Jevons
#88. The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God ...
Leon M. Lederman
#89. Some mathematicians didn't even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#90. The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#91. Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he's lived in the state his whole life, replies, "Not yet."
John Allen Paulos
#92. After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.
John Harsanyi
#93. There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#94. James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work.
Simon Newcomb
#95. It is really this "mathematical mindset" that seems to be most useful to those who are not trained to think as mathematicians.
Edward Frenkel
#96. Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!
Mark Mason
#97. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less.
Elizabeth Green
#98. A Noah's Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, 'Almost All Children Left Behind.'
David Mumford
#99. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark.
Roberto Bolano
#100. As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!
Dan Brown
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