Top 100 Quotes About Mathematics
#1. No one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor has created for us.
{Expressing the importance of Georg Cantor's set theory in the development of mathematics.}
David Hilbert
#3. During the past fifty years, more mathematics has been created than in all previous ages put together.
Ian Stewart
#4. Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.
Alfred Korzybski
#5. The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
#6. I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.
Andrew Wiles
#7. The mathematics stacks were as silent and empty as ever - apparently no one suspected the riches hidden there.
Yoko Ogawa
#8. ....young people unskilled in mathematics, addled by credit cards, and weaned on so-called intelligent design...will somehow retool American science for another generation of world industrial leadership.
Kevin Phillips
#9. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
Albert Einstein
#10. It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.
Andrew Wiles
#11. When I finished high school, it was clear to me that I would study mathematics, even if I also considered economics and psychology.
Reinhard Selten
#12. Ah, wine. Wine was my friend. Wine understood me. Wine knew that it was entirely possible to be one hundred percent happy for your sisters and also ten percent jealous, because Wine does not care about mathematics.
Melanie Harlow
#13. The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.
Carl Sagan
#14. Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry ... Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.
J. Ruth Gendler
#15. I have been running maths clubs for children completely free. In my building in Bangalore, I conduct maths clubs for several months, and every child who attended the club was poor in mathematics and is now showing brilliant results.
Shakuntala Devi
#16. I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college.
Danica McKellar
#17. By simple mathematics giving is key to the world you seek to live in. If I take I alone gain. If I give or share then two at least are enriched.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
#18. Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.
Leonard Adleman
#19. The fact is there are few more popular subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune.
G.H. Hardy
#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. In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.
Hermann Hankel
#23. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
Joseph Conrad
#24. I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.
John Forbes Nash Jr.
#25. At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.
Eric Maskin
#26. In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.
Carl Sagan
#27. Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.
Hermann Weyl
#28. I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
Philip Kitcher
#29. The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.
John McLaughlin
#30. Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.
Jacob Appelbaum
#31. In mathematics, there's a name for this short-term greed, the process of always choosing the option that gives you instant gratification. It's called the "greedy algorithm," and following it almost always leads to a plateau.
Bob Sullivan
#32. Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.
Jordan Ellenberg
#33. 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
#34. I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#35. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - John von Neumann
Ray Kurzweil
#36. An announcement of [Christopher] Zeeman's lecture at Northwestern University in the spring of 1977 contains a quote describing catastrophe theory as the most important development in mathematics since the invention of calculus 300 years ago.
Stephen Smale
#37. The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#38. Mathematics or Fate: Whatever that force is that keeps bringing us together in world after world, it's powerful. Undeniable. But I still don't know whether that force means my salvation or my destruction
Claudia Gray
#39. Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.
Stanislaw Ulam
#40. If the proof starts from axioms, distinguishes several cases, and takes thirteen lines in the text book ... it may give the youngsters the impression that mathematics consists in proving the most obvious things in the least obvious way.
George Polya
#41. While there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics ...
Hilary Putnam
#42. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
Lawrence R. Klein
#43. Mathematics is nothing more, nothing less, than the exact part of our thinking.
L. E. J. Brouwer
#44. Mathematics is very much like poetry ... what makes a good poem
a great poem
is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like
or are poems.
Lipman Bers
#45. Wherever Mathematics is mixed up with anything, which is outside its field, you will find attempts to demonstrate these merely conventional propositions a priori, and it will be your task to find out the false deduction in each case.
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
#46. Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.
William Thurston
#47. Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).
Carl Sagan
#48. My special pleasure in mathematics rested particularly on its purely speculative part.
Bernard Bolzano
#49. Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#50. Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.
Bertrand Russell
#51. Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.
Milton Friedman
#52. Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#53. I'm obviously attuned to pick up mathematics whenever I can see it. But in Mozart there is a lot of conscious use of mathematical symbolism and numbers in order to try and give messages.
Marcus Du Sautoy
#54. I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.
Margaret Geller
#55. Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: 'The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
John C. Lennox
#56. Woodrow Wilson, like most other educated Americans of his time, despised mathematics, complaining that "the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be leaned by painful process of drill.
Sylvia Nasar
#57. I'm no mathematics whizz, but even I know that when the variables start piling up, it's time to ditch the equation and see if you can find a cheat sheet.
David E. Manuel
#58. Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.
Ian Stewart
#59. Mathematics is like childhood diseases. The younger you get it, the better.
Arnold Sommerfeld
#61. Mathematics is one of the deepest and most powerful expressions of pure human reason, and, at the same time, the most fundamental resource for description and analysis of the experiential world.
Hyman Bass
#62. If there be some who, though ignorant of all mathematics ... dare to reprove this work, because of some passage of Scripture, which they have miserably warped to their purpose, I regard them not, and even despise their rash judgement.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#63. The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated.
James Newman
#64. With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#65. I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#66. The completion of my undergraduate training at the University of California (Berkeley) provided just the needed touches of rigor at advanced levels in both economics and mathematics.
Lawrence R. Klein
#67. The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.
Robert Turnbull
#68. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Albert Einstein
#69. I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.
Rodney Brooks
#70. Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.
David Mumford
#72. Maybe I'm wrong; I might not believe in fate but I do believe in causality and who's to say fate isn't just a sort of social mathematics that brings like-minded people together.
Simon Pegg
#73. Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.
John Pipkin
#74. The issue, then, is not, What is the best way to teach? but, What is mathematics really all about? ... Controversies about ... teaching cannot be resolved without confronting problems about the nature of mathematics.
Reuben Hersh
#75. What humans do with the language of mathematics is to describe patterns ... To grow mathematically children must be exposed to a rich variety of patterns appropriate to their own lives through which they can see variety, regularity, and interconnections.
Lynn Steen
#76. Mathematics is often defined as the science of space and number ... it was not until the recent resonance of computers and mathematics that a more apt definition became fully evident: mathematics is the science of patterns.
Lynn Steen
#77. Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.
Heather Wilson
#78. Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence ... the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.
Hannah Arendt
#79. Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
Samuel Butler
#80. One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.
Galileo Galilei
#81. Doing research in mathematics is frustrating and if being frustrated is something you cannot get used to, then mathematics may not be an ideal occupation for you.
Peter Sarnak
#82. Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation.
Jacque Fresco
#83. It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.
Timothy Gowers
#84. Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
#85. The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult
problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were
impossible.
Freeman Dyson
#86. Every accomplishment, every refined talent, every useful attainment in mathematics, music, and in all sciences, and art belong to the Saints.
Brigham Young
#87. Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.
Martin Gardner
#88. I didn't work especially hard at mathematics at school, because I knew that's what I'd be doing later.
David Hilbert
#89. I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.
Alvin E. Roth
#90. There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.
Francois Viete
#91. The heart of mathematics consists of concrete examples and concrete problems. Big general theories are usually afterthoughts based on small but profound insights; the insights themselves come from concrete special cases.
Paul Halmos
#92. I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.
John Hurt
#93. People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.
Richard P. Feynman
#94. What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it's fun to try to learn some of the secrets.
Paul Halmos
#95. Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.
Richard Hamming
#96. There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
Voltaire
#97. There are all sorts of things embodied in the LEGO brick - geometry and mathematics and truth and proportion and shape and colour ... It is a faintly spiritual activity that everybody connects with.
James May
#98. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.
Richard Feynman
#99. I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
Stephen Sondheim
#100. The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.
George Bernard Shaw
