Quotes About Theorems

#1. God has the Big Book, the beautiful proofs of mathematical theorems are listed here.

Paul Erdos

#2. The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

E. T. Bell

#3. A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.

Stefan Banach

#4. That's the problem with false proofs of true theorems; it's not easy to produce a counterexample.

Jeffrey Shallit

#5. Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.

G.H. Hardy

#6. All theorems have three names: a French name, a German name, and a Russian name, each nationality having claimed to discover it first. Once in a while there's an English name, too, but it's always Newton.

Arthur Mattuck

#7. Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.

Imre Lakatos

#8. The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance.

Edward Mills Purcell

#9. How many theorems in geometry which have seemed at first impracticable are in time successfully worked out!

Archimedes

#10. There are three signs of senility. The first sign is that a man forgets his theorems. The second sign is that he forgets to zip up. The third sign is that he forgets to zip down.

Paul Erdos

#11. Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.

Hermann Hankel

#12. 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

#13. You can learn to find unknowns in equations, draw equidistant lines and demonstrate theorems, but in real life there's nothing to position, calculate, or guess.

Delphine De Vigan

#14. 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

#15. Paul Erdos has a theory that God has a book containing all the theorems of mathematics with their absolutely most beautiful proofs, and when he wants to express particular appreciation of a proof he exclaims, "This is from the book!"

Ross Honsberger

#16. 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

#17. Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or mathematics envy.

Marvin Minsky

#18. Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.

Antony Garrett Lisi

#19. 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

#20. they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds.

C.S. Lewis

#21. One may characterize physics as the doctrine of the repeatable, be it a succession in time or the co-existence in space. The validity of physical theorems is founded on this repeatability.

Friedrich Hund

#22. Fact: She was alone with Quint in his bedchamber.
Fact: He was talking of theorems, secret messages, and mathematical probability.
Fact: She was incredibly, distractingly aroused.

Joanna Shupe

#23. 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

#24. If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.

Bernhard Riemann

#25. There are infinitely many variations of the initial situation and therefore no doubt indefinitely many theorems of moral geometry.

John Rawls

#26. For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

Michael Frayn

#27. I have found a very great number of exceedingly beautiful theorems.

Pierre De Fermat

#28. Response, when asked how he came upon his theorems.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#29. To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples ...

John B. Conway

#30. Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs.

Kenneth Appel

#31. Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but
eat as you ought. For remember that in this manner Socrates also universally avoided all ostentation.

Epictetus

#32. The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

Rudolf Clausius

#33. I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upwards in a multitude of techniques and theorems while the root drives into the depths.

Gottlob Frege

#34. If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

Martin Gardner

#35. Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

C.S. Lewis

#36. History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The

Ludwig Von Mises

#37. There are very few theorems in advanced analysis which have been demonstrated in a logically tenable manner. Everywhere one finds this miserable way of concluding from the special to the general and it is extremely peculiar that such a procedure has led to so few of the so-called paradoxes.

Niels Henrik Abel

#38. The most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.

Alan Moore

#39. Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Joseph Stiglitz

#40. A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.

Jonathan Stroud

#41. A mathematician," he liked to say, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Mason Currey

#42. The job of economic theorists is to prove theorems. The job of policy economists is to figure out which theorems to apply.

N. Gregory Mankiw

#43. Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems.

Carl Pomerance

#44. Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#45. A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems

Paul Erdos

#46. I think that mathematics can benefit by acknowledging that the creation of good models is just as important as proving deep theorems.

David Mumford

#47. The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have all been conjectured, sometimes a hundred years or more before they were proved; and they have been suggested by the evidence of a mass of computations.

G.H. Hardy

#48. For even sheep do not vomit up their grass and show to the shepherds how much they have eaten; but when they have internally digested the pasture, they produce externally wool and milk. Do you also show not your theorems to the uninstructed, but show the acts which come from their digestion.

Epictetus

#49. Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

#50. We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

Gian-Carlo Rota

#51. Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...

Thomas Pynchon

#52. Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means ...

Henri Poincare

#53. It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

Stanislaw Ulam