Mathematics Quotes

1. "All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other, and all means of discovering them are equally admissible."
Author: Adrien Marie Legendre

2. "(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often."
Author: Alfred Marshall

3. "I changed the course of my life, from the rigidity of mathematics and the corporate rhythm to a more bohemian world."
Author: Andrea Hirata

4. "Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you're good, bad things can still happen. And if you're bad, you can still be lucky."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

5. "Do you know why I love mathematics?""Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"Eccles snorted in surprise. "Well, yes, but there's another reason."
Author: Brendan Halpin

6. "Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth."
Author: Brian Greene

7. "But Einstein refused to be mathematics' pawn. He bucked the equations in favor of his intuition about how the cosmos should be, his deep-seated belief that the universe was eternal and, on the largest of scales, fixed and unchanging. The universe, Einstein admonished Lemaître, is not now expanding and never was."
Author: Brian Greene

8. "Norma looked at him, puzzled. "Someone else to do the mathematics?""Of course!" Holtzman brushed iron-gray hair away from his face and adjusted his white robe. "You're an *idea* person, like me. We want you to develop concepts, not bother with full-fledged implementation. You should not waste time performing tedious arithmetic. Any halfway-trained person can do that. It's what slaves are for."
Author: Brian Herbert

9. "I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I'm not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did. I mean, I read books written for laymen, not textbooks or anything."
Author: Chris Parnell

10. "Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country."
Author: David Hilbert

11. "Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."
Author: Edsger Dijkstra

12. "It was as though applied mathematics was my spouse, and pure mathematics was my secret lover."
Author: Edward Frenkel

13. "Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork."
Author: Elbert Hubbard

14. "What is Mathematics? A science that uses numbers to explain difficult situations of life. Not really! It is an art of seeing what many people cannot see."
Author: Femi Olalekan Komolafe

15. "Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought."
Author: Frank Plumpton Ramsey

16. "Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man. But on the whole the history of science is fair, and this is particularly true in mathematics. No other subject has such clear-cut or unanimously accepted standards, and the men who are remembered are almost always the men who merit it. Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments."
Author: G.H. Hardy

17. "Mr S. got angry.‘Yes, I do have a son. He's a good-for-nothing. A dead loss.'I couldn't ask which prison he was in, so I put it more tactfully: ‘What is he doing?'He sighed deeply: ‘He's a professor of mathematics at London University."
Author: George Mikes

18. "To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency ... . The Realist position is probably the one which most mathematicians would prefer to take. It is not until he becomes aware of some of the difficulties in set theory that he would even begin to question it. If these difficulties particularly upset him, he will rush to the shelter of Formalism, while his normal position will be somewhere between the two, trying to enjoy the best of two worlds."
Author: Hilbert

19. "Seldon, Hari—It is customary to think of Hari Seldon only in connection with psychohistory, to see him only as Mathematics and as social change personified. There is no doubt that he himselfEncouraged this for at no time in his formal writings did he give any hint as to how he came to solve the various problems ofPsychohistory. His leaps of thought might have all been plucked FromAir, for all he tells us. Nor does he tell us of the blind alleysInto which he crept or the wrong turnings he may have made.…As for his private life, it is a blank. Concerning his parent and Siblings,We know a handful of factors, nor more. His only son,Raych Seldon, is known to have been adopted, but how thatCame about is not known. Concerning his wife, we onlyKnow that she existed. Clearly, Seldon wanted to a cipherExcept where psychohistory was concerned. It is as though he felt--Or wanted it to be felt—that he did not live, he merely psychohistorified."
Author: Isaac Asimov

20. "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."
Author: James Joseph Sylvester

21. "The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated."
Author: James Newman

22. "When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist."
Author: James Rothman

23. "I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959."
Author: John Forbes Nash Jr.

24. "At the age of 12, I developed an intense interest in mathematics. On exposure to algebra, I was fascinated by simultaneous equations and read ahead of the class to the end of the book."
Author: John Pople

25. "Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
Author: John Steinbeck

26. "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
Author: John Von Neumann

27. "There cannot be a language more universal and more simple, more free from errors and obscurities...more worthy to express the invariable relations of all natural things [than mathematics]. [It interprets] all phenomena by the same language, as if to attest the unity and simplicity of the plan of the universe, and to make still more evident that unchangeable order which presides over all natural causes"
Author: Joseph Fourier

28. "Politics were as bad as mathematics, and that the mission of politicians seemed to be calling each other names"
Author: Louisa May Alcott

29. "You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about."
Author: Marcus Du Sautoy

30. "In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm."
Author: Margaret Wertheim

31. "Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics."
Author: Matt Haig

32. "Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums"
Author: Michael Frayn

33. "The first revolution is to transform the status of evaluation from untouchable to respectable , i.e., from the days a century ago when the value-free doctrine held that there could be no place for the serious treatment of evaluation within the sciences (or in the company of other respectable disciplines like history, jurisprudence, mathematics, etc.) to the days when even the National Academy of Sciences is doing evaluations at the request of Congress without protest from leading scientific and other professional organizations, and everyone will have good reasons for this acceptance."
Author: Michael Scriven

34. "Mathematics should be studied if only for that it puts the mind in order."
Author: Mikhail Lomonosov

35. "(existential mathematics...) the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting." –p. 39"
Author: Milan Kundera

36. "The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason."
Author: Nicholas Murray Butler

37. "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
Author: Nikola Tesla

38. "There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world."
Author: Nikolai Lobachevsky

39. "Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations."
Author: Paul Lockhart

40. "[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me."
Author: Paul R. Halmos

41. "With me, everything turns into mathematics."
Author: René Descartes

42. "It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics."
Author: Richard Dawkins

43. "The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his father and mother. It is what people do not know, that they persecute each other about. Science will bring, not a sword, but peace."
Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

44. "It has been said at various points in history that the current sum of humanknowledge is but a fraction of that which was once known, yet now is lost.Likewise, it is argued with simple mathematics that any sum of knowledge wemay yet accrue must always equate to virtually nothing when compared to theinfinity of what is. Apparently our's is a fate of perpetual ignorance. What then is truly lost in the course of human events?(attrib: 'R.I.B. Ushguriud', Note On The Text)"
Author: Robert Robert

45. "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..."
Author: Roger Bacon

46. "Miri took genuine comfort in studying Mathematics that day. She could sort numbers into two simple ideas: true and not true. Unlike numbers, words were rarely just one thing. They moved and changed, camouflaging and leaping out unexpectedly. Words were slippery and alive; words wrestled out of her grip and became something new. Words were dangerous."
Author: Shannon Hale

47. "I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic."
Author: Stephen Cole Kleene

48. "Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever."
Author: Stieg Larsson

49. "All I know, all I can comprehend of the mathematics of a life, are the times your hand is inside my hand, and the times it is not."
Author: Tyler Knott Gregson

50. "Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Mathematics Quotes Pictures