Top 100 Quotes About Mathematicians
#1. Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.
James Gleick
#2. Mathematicians among my readers do not need to be informed that " ... " is the algebraical sign representing a blend of wheeze, croak, and hiccough.
P.G. Wodehouse
#3. 2+2=5 wasn't intentional. I thought you carry a 1 every time there are two 2's in an equation. I'm not stupid, the mathematicians is stupid
Thom Yorke
#4. Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand ... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.
G.H. Hardy
#5. In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.
Alfred Adler
#6. The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss.
Ian Stewart
#8. Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.
Augustus De Morgan
#9. I work with a lot of mathematicians, and one thing I notice about them is that they are not particularly fast with numbers; in fact some of them are rather slow. This is not a bad thing; they are slow because they think deeply and carefully about mathematics.
Jo Boaler
#10. Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchman. They translate into their own language whatever is said to them and forthwith the thing is utterly changed.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#11. Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.
Ron Eglash
#12. Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.
Abraham Flexner
#13. If war were arithmetic, then the mathematicians would rule the world. (Lord Petyr Baelish)
George R R Martin
#14. I like to think of mathematicians as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origin, race, creed, sex, age or even time ... all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.
Julia Robinson
#15. It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#16. Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations.
Ralph P. Boas Jr.
#17. Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#18. Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
Charles Caleb Colton
#20. Mathematicians have, according to Wright, been "unreasonably successful" in finding applications to apparently useless theorems, and often years after the theorems were first discovered.
Alex Bellos
#21. It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.
Mark Kac
#22. The Internet gives you access to a lot of material, and it's fun to sit and read. I go to something like Wikipedia and look at different topics ... I find the subject fascinating. I like to read about concepts and mathematicians.
Viswanathan Anand
#23. The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
Andrew Wiles
#24. The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.
Samuel Johnson
#25. In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.
Stephen Hawking
#26. Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide.
Antoine Lavoisier
#27. Thus the good christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make false prophecies, however much they may in fact speak the truth; lest, being in league with the devil, they may deceive errant souls into making common cause.
Saint Augustine
#28. Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?
Henry Markram
#29. It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.
Richard Courant
#30. Games are among the most interesting creations of the human mind, and the analysis of their structure is full of adventure and surprises. Unfortunately there is never a lack of mathematicians for the job of transforming delectable ingredients into a dish that tastes like a damp blanket.
James R Newman
#31. There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#32. For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.
Stephen Cole Kleene
#33. I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.
Donald Knuth
#34. Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#35. The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.
Stanislaw Ulam
#36. We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics).
Keith Devlin
#37. Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.
Larry Wall
#38. Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.
James C. Maxwell
#39. Relations between pure and applied mathematicians are based on trust and understanding.
Namely, pure mathematicians do not trust applied mathematicians, and applied mathematicians do not understand pure mathematicians.
Albert Einstein
#40. Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.
Daniel Tammet
#41. 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
#42. What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians?
Albert Einstein
#43. What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.
Galileo Galilei
#44. She knew only one hint left by Rob: Enigma. There had been a few genius mathematicians who invented much more than a computing-like device, they figured out one of the most important intelligence formulas. Rob had programmed it in the Mold language.
J.M.K. Walkow
#45. When I told my son that I had to give a talk about my work to non-mathematicians, he warned me that regular people don't think like mathematicians.
Richard A. Falk
#46. The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.
Bill Gaede
#47. I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
George Woodcock
#48. First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
Andre Weil
#49. The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
Voltaire
#50. The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
Augustine Of Hippo
#51. When I told my mother that I have to give a talk, and was debating what could I possibly say to non-mathematicians, she said: "You got what to wear?".
Richard A. Falk
#52. In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.
Robert Musil
#53. The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.
Albert Einstein
#54. As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.
William Stanley Jevons
#55. The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.
Felix Klein
#56. [John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians
Freeman Dyson
#57. I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.
M.C. Escher
#59. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them.
Jimmy Chin
#61. Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.
Vandana Shiva
#62. 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
#63. Some humans are mathematicians-others aren't.
Jane Goodall
#64. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. [I]t is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.
Mark Haddon
#66. Oh yes, children often commit murders. And quite clever ones, too. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to make great names for themselves, start amazingly early ... Like mathematicians and musicians. Poets develop later.
John Lee Mahin
#67. Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.
Stefan Banach
#68. Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes
John Naughton
#69. It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.
Timothy Gowers
#70. Need we add that mathematicians themselves are not infallible?
Henri Poincare
#71. The mathematical fraternity is a little like a self-perpetuating priesthood. The mathematicians of today teach the mathematicians of tomorrow and, in effect, decide whom to admit to the priesthood.
Paul Halmos
#72. Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#73. The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#74. Are not most professional mathematicians spared all trouble incident to income?
Tobias Dantzig
#76. A lot of boys in my poker circle are mathematicians who play on probability. I don't have that kind of brain, so I rely on instinct. But I recently found out that poker and cards in general go way back in my family gene pool.
Natalie Dormer
#77. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new.
William Thurston
#78. It's true we pure mathematicians are connected to a different world. But it is a very real world nevertheless.
Isadore Singer
#79. The real work of us mathematicians, from now until, roughly, fifty years from now, when computers won't need us anymore, is to make the transition from human-centric math to machine-centric math as smooth and efficient as possible.
Doron Zeilberger
#80. For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.
W. W. Rouse Ball
#81. Artists realise that mathematicians have a way of looking at the world that can make them see things differently.
Marcus Du Sautoy
#82. So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#83. She hated everything. The library with its pile of books full of explanations about life; the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn't know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy.
Paulo Coelho
#84. What the commands of mathematicians, God, and playwrights have in common seems to be this, that the mere act of speaking suffices to bring about the truth of what is said.
Alfred Mollin
#85. I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.
Richard P. Feynman
#86. It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension.
H.P. Lovecraft
#87. There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one ...
Ruth Rendell
#88. A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.
Alice Oswald
#89. We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
Richard P. Feynman
#90. Basic trigonometric properties put forth by Muslim mathematicians serve as basis for how GPS systems work today
Firas Alkhateeb
#91. Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects.
Henri Poincare
#92. Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#93. Among mathematicians in general, three main categories may be distinguished; and perhaps the names logicians, formalists, and intuitionists may serve to characterize them.
Felix Klein
#94. I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal ... like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
#95. All these people that I used to know, they're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives.
Bob Dylan
#96. Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's ... scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!
Thomas A. Edison
#97. Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#98. The inner circle of pure mathematicians will respond to the book with delight.
Philip J. Davis
#99. Mathematicians are inexorably drawn to nature, not just describing what is to be found there, but in creating echoes of natural laws.
Roger Lewin
#100. There are two kind of mathematicians, smart ones, and dumb ones. I am one of the dumb ones.
Lipman Bers
