Quotes About Mathematics By Mathematicians

#1. Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.

Augustus De Morgan

#2. A result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs.
The Nature of Mathematics

Max Black

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.

Richard P. Feynman

#8. Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics.

Henri Poincare

#9. It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

Hans Reichenbach

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.

Timothy Gowers

#24. 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

#25. Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Edsger Dijkstra

#26. 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

#27. [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

Henry Adams

#28. 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

#29. All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

Martin Gardner

#30. Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.

Albert Einstein

#31. Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.

Richard P. Gabriel

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#36. 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

#37. Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

Jack Edmonds

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Charles Hermite

#45. Mathematics is concerned with "all possible worlds."

David Malet Armstrong

#46. [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