The Mathematician Quotes

#1. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!

Paul Lockhart

#2. The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

George Henry Lewes

#3. The library is the mathematician's laboratory.

Paul Halmos

#4. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

G.H. Hardy

#5. The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

Ernst Mach

#6. How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

W. H. Auden

#7. The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman.

Francois Arago

#8. Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination.

Leonard Koppett

#9. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

Paul Dirac

#10. The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

Havelock Ellis

#11. Puzzles are made of the things that the mathematician, no less than the child, plays with, and dreams and wonders about, for they are made of things and circumstances of the world he [or she] live in.

Edward Kasner

#12. The mathematician knows some things, no doubt, but not those things one usually wants to get from him.

Albert Einstein

#13. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#14. What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.

Vincent Buranelli

#15. The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful.

Jules Henri Poincare

#16. The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

Karl Pearson

#17. 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

#18. It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

Steven Weinberg

#19. The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God.

J. W. N. Sullivan

#20. One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems.

Thomas Little Heath

#21. The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.

Francis Bacon

#22. Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Eddington

#23. The desire to explore thus marks out the mathematician. This is one of the forces making for the growth of mathematics. The mathematician enjoys what he already knows; he is eager for more knowledge.

W.W. Sawyer

#24. I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics," Darger said. "She is, in either case, ravishing.

Michael Swanwick

#25. The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

George Bernard Shaw

#26. To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: "the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.

Oswald Spengler

#27. The mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence.

Hans Reichenbach

#28. 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

#29. Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#30. The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

G.K. Chesterton

#31. Mankind has moved away from the heart of the world to the logic of the mind, and their belief is in the chemist, the physicist, and the mathematician. Science has proven to them that all this ancient belief in ceremony is simply ignorance.

Drunvalo Melchizedek

#32. Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.

Hermann Weyl

#33. When a king asked Euclid, the mathematician, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner? he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry.

Samuel Johnson

#34. Perhaps ... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.

Antoine Lavoisier

#35. Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.

Andre Weil

#36. Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Arthur Eddington

#37. A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician .

Charles Sanders Peirce

#38. The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.

Gosta Mittag-Leffler

#39. In India, I learned a proverb that says, 'Distrust the calculation seven times over, the mathematician a hundred times.'

Julio Cesar De Mello E Souza

#40. The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof, but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by GUESSING.

George Polya

#41. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.

Seneca.

#42. The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

#43. One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.

Norbert Wiener

#44. This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The

Steven Pinker

#45. The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.

James Joseph Sylvester

#46. The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.

James C. Maxwell

#47. Von Neumann, by contrast, wore a three-piece suit at almost all times, including on a donkey ride down the Grand Canyon; even as a student he was so well dressed that, upon first meeting him, the mathematician David Hilbert reportedly had but one question: Who is his tailor?45

Walter Isaacson

#48. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

William James

#49. May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

James Joseph Sylvester

#50. Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

Molly Antopol

#51. The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.

Joseph Louis Francois Bertrand

#52. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

Henri Poincare

#53. The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.

G.H. Hardy

#54. I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.

Steven Strogatz

#55. In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

#56. It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw.

Augustus De Morgan

#57. It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Aristotle.

#58. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Storm Jameson

#59. Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#60. A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.

Bill Gaede

#61. The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

Alfred Adler

#62. Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one; and most of the finest products of an applied mathematician's fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have been created, for the brutal but sufficient reason that they do not fit the facts.

G.H. Hardy

#63. So on we tramped, three small dots on a big mountain, mere specks, beings of no importance. In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

Ruskin Bond

#64. I am a mathematician and I can confidently say that the best figure ever produced is your phone number.

Amit Kalantri

#65. I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

David Chalmers

#66. 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

#67. The whole thing that makes a mathematician's life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

Donald Knuth

#68. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#69. An Engineer rounds numbers based on the system behaviour and a Mathematician or a Schoolkid does it based on a pedagogical rule.

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#70. I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

Benoit Mandelbrot

#71. The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Clifford Geertz

#72. 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

#73. On completing my degree, I started a Ph.D. in statistics, although I knew very little about the topic. My supervisor was Professor Harry Pitt, who was an excellent pure mathematician and probabilist.

Clive Granger

#74. No mathematician of equal stature has risen from our generation ... Hilbert was singularly free from national and racial prejudices; in all public questions, be they political, social or spiritual, he stood forever on the side of freedom.

Hermann Weyl

#75. When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask.

Paul Halmos

#76. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.

Rachel Sklar

#77. About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I loved and felt that I was good at.

Deborah Mailman

#78. The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.

William Poundstone

#79. Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

Gian-Carlo Rota

#80. 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

#81. In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

Scarlett Thomas

#82. A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#83. A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

Bill Gaede

#84. The mathematics of Malthus? A quick Internet search led him to information about a prominent nineteenth-century English mathematician and demographist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who had famously predicted an eventual global collapse due to overpopulation.

Dan Brown

#85. Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays.

Philip J. Davis

#86. So each one of you agrees to disagree with whatever the other one agrees with, but if you both disagree with the same thing, aren't you really in agreement?

Norton Juster

#87. Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, he said: I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.

Edmund Landau

#88. Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

Catherynne M Valente

#89. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Norbert Wiener

#90. Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

Hermann Hesse

#91. 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

#92. It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

Aristotle.

#93. Monty Jones: Dad, is there a word to describe answers that are completely correct but entirely useless under the circumstances?
Professor Jones: Yes, yes there is.

David Morgan-Mar

#94. Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

Noam Chomsky

#95. If you experience this feeling once, you will want to go back and do it again. This was the first time it happened to me, and like the first kiss, it was very special. I knew then that I could call myself mathematician.

Edward Frenkel

#96. Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.

Henry Hallett Dale

#97. Hilbert once had a student in mathematics who stopped coming to his lectures, and he was finally told the young man had gone off to become a poet. Hilbert is reported to have remarked: 'I never thought he had enough imagination to be a mathematician.'

George Polya

#98. I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#99. My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#100. I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.

Whitfield Diffie