Top 100 Quotes About The Mathematics
#2. Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.
Mary Everest Boole
#3. Any argument where one supposes an arbitrary choice to be made an uncountably infinite number of times ... [is] outside the domain of mathematics.
Emile Borel
#4. A peculiarity of the higher arithmetic is the great difficulty which has often been experienced in proving simple general theorems which had been suggested quite naturally by numerical evidence.
Harold Davenport
#5. [The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.
Albert Einstein
#6. Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.
David Chalmers
#8. We can ... treat only the geometrical aspects of mathematics and shall be satisfied in having shown that there is no problem of the truth of geometrical axioms and that no special geometrical visualization exists in mathematics.
Hans Reichenbach
#9. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#10. The language of mathematics, scientific observations, and our perceptivity together knit the window to reality.
Neeti Sinha
#11. The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#12. The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical ... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.
Morris Kline
#13. Mathematics and poetry are the two ways to drink the beauty of truth.
Amit Ray
#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
#15. Mathematics is not a science from our point of view, in the sense that it is not a natural science. The test of its validity is not experiment.
Richard Feynman
#16. It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics.
Isaac Asimov
#17. Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts ... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.
Viswanathan Anand
#18. A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.
Howard Whitley Eves
#19. The source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
Paul Halmos
#20. This therefore is Mathematics:
She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul;
She gives life to her own discoveries;
She awakens the mind and purifies the intellect;
She brings light to our intrinsic ideas;
She abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth ...
Proclus
#21. All mathematicians share ... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
Martin Gardner
#22. You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science; it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied.
William Stanley Jevons
#23. Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
G.H. Hardy
#24. I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.
James Sanborn
#25. In mathematics and science, there is no difference in the intelligence of men and women. The difference in genes between men and women is simply the Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with intelligence.
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard
#26. 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
#27. In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.
Jelly Roll Morton
#28. The standard "foundation" for mathematics starts with sets and their elements. It is possible to start differently, by axiomatising not elements of sets but functions between sets. This can be done by using the language of categories and universal constructions.
Saunders Mac Lane
#29. As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.
William Thurston
#30. A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality: statistics.
Yuval Noah Harari
#31. At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.
Danica McKellar
#32. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe
Paul Dirac
#33. As you are entered with the class of Nat. philosophy, give to it the hours of lecture, but devote all your other time to Mathematics, avoiding company as the bane of all progress.
Thomas Jefferson
#34. To understand the Universe, you must understand the language in which it's written, the language of Mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
#35. Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.
Edward Kasner
#37. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
#38. It is the exact experience of mathematics. Not merely the adding up of your grocery bill, or the daily uses that we make of number. But the great concept of a universal exactitude, that numbers are an instrument of magic. And by means of them, men can unlock all the wonders of the world.
Manly Hall
#39. Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.
Donald Ervin Knuth
#40. Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.
Hermann Weyl
#41. I am severely dyslexic, so I'm not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don't excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.
Raha Moharrak
#42. 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
#43. I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#44. The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.
Carl Gustav Hempel
#45. The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.
Clifford A. Pickover
#46. In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom ... .
Michael Lewis
#47. The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state.
Carl Sagan
#48. I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us,
Jurgen Neffe
#49. I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma'am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another.
Anne Shirley
#50. 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
#51. Numbers are the most certain things we have.
Andy Rooney
#52. [Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention.
James Joseph Sylvester
#53. I was performing at a New Jersey high school, and I asked a class of 2,000 students, 'How many of you love mathematics?' and only one hand went up. And that was the hand of the maths teacher!
Shakuntala Devi
#54. No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?
Paul Lockhart
#55. 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
#56. In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
Steve Wozniak
#57. 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
#58. I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.
Brit Marling
#59. I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ... , which is never permissible in mathematics.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#60. There's a technicality to designing and wearing hats. A hat is balancing the proportions of your face; it's like architecture or mathematics.
Philip Treacy
#61. All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#62. Anyway, so you take your space and hook it into the spaces of others, and it becomes this massive network of hooked profiles and spaced out stuff that gives rise to all kinds of newish social phenomena based on the mathematics of exponential expansion and the science of complexity.
Zubin J. Shroff
#63. Mathematics is one of the surest ways for a man to feel the power of thought and the magic of the spirit. Mathematics is one of the eternal truths and, as such, raises the spirit to the same level on which we feel the presence of God.
Julio Cesar De Mello E Souza
#64. It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
#65. In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it ... research.
Tom Lehrer
#66. Our mathematics is the symbolic counterpart of the universe we perceive, and its power has been continuously enhanced by human exploration.
Mario Livio
#67. The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing.
James Newman
#68. Fletcher shrugged. "Science and mathematics are all the rage, you know. But who has time for good old Horace?
Ashley Gardner
#69. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I've also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I've got the skills for both.
Brendan Myers
#70. If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics ...
Roger Bacon
#71. It is a well-known experience that the only truly enjoyable and profitable way of studying mathematics is the method of "filling in details" by one's own efforts.
Cornelius Lanczos
#72. Although in principle we know the equations that govern the whole of biology, we have not been able to reduce the study of human behavior to a branch of applied mathematics.
Stephen Hawking
#73. If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
E. T. Bell
#74. 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
#75. Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#76. The very term 'combinatorial methods' has an oxymoronic character.
Joel Spencer
#77. I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Thomas Mann
#78. 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
#79. Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.
Bertrand Russell
#80. In mathematics, two angles that are said to coincide fit together perfectly. The word "coincidence" does not describe luck or mistakes. It describes that which fits together perfectly.
Wayne Dyer
#81. They shouldn't be allowed to teach math so early in the morning.
Kendare Blake
#82. My occupation is an open question. I was once an assistant professor of mathematics. Since then, I have spent time living in the woods of Montana.
Theodore Kaczynski
#83. Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry.
Vladimir Arnold
#84. As a boy, it was clear that my inclinations were toward the physical sciences. Mathematics, mechanics, and chemistry were among the fields that gave me a special satisfaction.
Ahmed Zewail
#85. Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#86. We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
Andrew Wiles
#87. Most expert, skilled behavior works this way, whether it is playing tennis or a musical instrument, or doing mathematics and science. Experts minimize the need for conscious reasoning. Philosopher
Donald A. Norman
#89. Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.
Felix Klein
#90. Mathematics is the queen of disciplines ... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!
Leo Tolstoy
#91. The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
Aristotle.
#92. Mathematics, in the development of its ideas, has only to take account of the immanent reality of its concepts and has absolutely no obligation to examine their transient reality.
Georg Cantor
#93. Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first- century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.
Lee Smolin
#94. And of course in the long run, if there is a constant fight, the graceful is bound to be defeated and the efficient mind will win, because the world understands the language of mathematics, not of love.
Osho
#95. The aim of mathematics is to explain as much as possible in simple terms.
Michael Atiyah
#96. If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.
Paul A.M. Dirac
#97. Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.
Richard Hamming
#98. Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.
Kurt Godel
#99. Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.
Ian Stewart
#100. After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way.
Isaac Asimov
