Teaching Mathematics Quotes

#1. Teaching mathematics, like teaching any art, requires the ability to inspire the student. Inspiration requires marketing, and marketing requires stirring communication.

Hartosh Singh Bal

#2. Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.

Simeon Denis Poisson

#3. In the online math class, there was almost no meaningful student/teacher or student/student interaction. To equate this type of online learning with a real-world classroom experience is a major stretch.

Ian Lamont

#4. [The] humanization of mathematical teaching, the bringing of the matter and the spirit of mathematics to bear not merely upon certain fragmentary faculties of the mind, but upon the whole mind, that this is the greatest desideratum is. I assume, beyond dispute.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

#5. Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture.

Lawrence Young

#6. Poor teaching leads to the inevitable idea that the subject (mathematics) is only adapted to peculiar minds, when it is the one universal science and the one whose four ground-rules are taught us almost in infancy and reappear in the motions to the universe.

Henry John Stephen Smith

#7. Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.

Edward Griffith Begle

#8. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.

Bertrand Russell

#9. Life is only good for two things, doing mathematics and teaching it.

Simeon Denis Poisson

#10. 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

#11. 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