Quotes and Sayings about Mathematics
"Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary."
- Will Adams
(Related: Art, Being, Geometry, Grace, Mathematics, Now, Reason, Understanding)
"When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves."
- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
(Related: Law, Literature, Mathematics, Writing)
"I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so."
- Edwin Armstrong
(Related: People, Causes, Ignorance, Mathematics, Trouble, World)
"Mathematics was hard, dull work. Geography pleased me more. For dancing I was quite enthusiastic."
- John James Audubon
(Related: Work, Dancing, Geography, Mathematics)
"In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race."
- Charles Babbage
(Related: Mathematics, Race)
"If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Man, Mathematics, Study, Wit)
"For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics."
- Roger Bacon
(Related: Knowledge, Mathematics, World)
"All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon."
- Roger Bacon
(Related: Science, People, Knowledge, Fact, Mathematics, Obvious)
"If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!"
- Johnny Ball
(Related: Elegance, Mathematics, Want)
"Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit."
- Stefan Banach
(Related: Creation, Mathematics, Spirit)
"Mathematics is as old as Man."
- Stefan Banach
(Related: Man, Mathematics, Old)
"The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future."
- E. T. Bell
(Related: Difficulties, Future, Mathematics, Mistakes, Past)
"The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes."
- E. T. Bell
(Related: Mathematics)
"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
- E. T. Bell
(Related: Art, Fitness, Feeling, Mathematicians, Mathematics, Now, Past, Sense, Simplicity, Usefulness)
"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
(Related: Experience, Mathematics)
"It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences."
- E. T. Bell
(Related: Immortality, Mathematics)
""Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."
- E. T. Bell
(Related: Mathematics, Word)
"Apart from two periods of intense study, of music between the ages of 12 and 14 and of mathematics between the ages of 14 and 16, I coasted, daydreaming, through most of my school years."
- James W. Black
(Related: Music, Mathematics, School, Study, Years)
"It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity."
- George Boole
(Related: Ideas, Mathematics, Quantity)
"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability."
- Vannevar Bush
(Related: Arithmetic, Mathematics, Poker, Understanding, World)
"In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it."
- Georg Cantor
(Related: Art, Mathematics, Question, Value)
"The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom."
- Georg Cantor
(Related: Freedom, Lies, Mathematics)
"Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music."
- Frank Capra
(Related: Music, Film, Mathematics)
"I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics."
- John Henry Carver
(Related: Mathematics, Physics, University)
"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
(Related: Science, Computer, Consciousness, Mathematics, Physics)
"Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used."
- Alonzo Church
(Related: Language, Logic, Mathematics)
"I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Science, Mathematics, Writing)
"The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Magnificence, Mathematics, Study)
"For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps."
- Christopher Columbus
(Related: Intelligence, Execution, Mathematics)
"Not a few other very eminent and scholarly men made the same request, urging that I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics."
- Nicolaus Copernicus
(Related: Men, Work, Fear, Mathematics, Students)
"Mathematics is written for mathematicians."
- Nicolaus Copernicus
(Related: Mathematicians, Mathematics)
"Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality."
- Richard Courant
(Related: Desire, Expression, Individuality, Intuition, Logic, Mathematics, Mind, Perfection, Reason, Will)
"For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?"
- Richard Courant
(Related: Experience, Mathematics, Philosophy)
"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."
- Richard Dawkins
(Related: Science, Boasts, Ignorance, Incompetence, Literature, Mathematics)
"The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern."
- Daniel Dennett
(Related: Science, Concern, Mathematics)
"We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions."
- Whitfield Diffie
(Related: Science, Success, Mathematics, Problems, Study)
"There should be no such thing as boring mathematics."
- Edsger Dijkstra
(Related: Mathematics)
"The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics."
- Edsger Dijkstra
(Related: Elegance, Mathematics)
"Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians."
- Edsger Dijkstra
(Related: Mathematicians, Mathematics, Programming)
"God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world."
- Paul Dirac
(Related: God, Mathematics, World)
"The mathematics is not there till we put it there."
- Arthur Eddington
(Related: Mathematics)
"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Poetry, Ideas, Mathematics)
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Difficulties, Mathematics, Worry)
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Laws, Mathematics, Reality)
"To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be."
- Leonhard Euler
(Related: Mathematics, Quantity)
"If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics."
- Galileo Galilei
(Related: Advice, Beginning, Mathematics)
"It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation."
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
(Related: Men, Fault, Mathematicians, Mathematics, May, Occupation)
"The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time."
- James J. Gibson
(Related: Time, Mathematics, Physics, Space, World)
"How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."
- John Gilmore
(Related: Society, Laws, Mathematics, Physics, Privacy, Want)
"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
(Related: Mathematics)
"I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art."
- G. H. Hardy
(Related: Art, Mathematics)
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."
- Godfrey Harold Hardy
(Related: Beauty, First, Mathematics, Ugly, World)
"We are servants rather than masters in mathematics."
- Charles Hermite
(Related: Mathematics)
"The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."
- David Hilbert
(Related: Art, Mathematics)
"Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper."
- David Hilbert
(Related: Mathematics, Rules)
"Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country."
- David Hilbert
(Related: Country, Mathematics, World)
"Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Poetry, Mathematics, Words)
"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics."
- William Joyce
(Related: Mathematics)
"I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy."
- Stephen Cole Kleene
(Related: Mathematics, Philosophy)
"I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic."
- Stephen Cole Kleene
(Related: Books, Logic, Mathematics)
"I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy."
- Stephen Cole Kleene
(Related: Education, College, Liberal, Mathematics, Philosophy)
"Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs."
- Felix Klein
(Related: Intuition, Mathematics, Sense)
"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."
- Felix Klein
(Related: Mathematics)
"The completion of my undergraduate training at the University of California (Berkeley) provided just the needed touches of rigor at advanced levels in both economics and mathematics."
- Lawrence R. Klein
(Related: Completion, Economics, Mathematics, Training, University)
"My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history."
- Lawrence R. Klein
(Related: Education, History, English, Mathematics, Public, School, Training)
"An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues."
- Lawrence R. Klein
(Related: Mathematics, Thinking, University)
"I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto."
- Walter Kohn
(Related: Mathematics)
"Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination."
- Sofia Kovalevskaya
(Related: Imagination, Science, Opportunity, Arithmetic, Mathematics, Reality)
"We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space."
- Nick Lampson
(Related: Science, Development, Future, Mathematics, Research, Space)
"Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics."
- Maimonides
(Related: First, Logic, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Order, Perfection, Study, Wishes)
"But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Life, Music, Logic, Mathematics)
"Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Music, Mathematics)
"Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience."
- Rudolph A. Marcus
(Related: Experience, Love, Being, Mathematics, Theory)
"My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set."
- Rudolph A. Marcus
(Related: Home, Beginning, Interest, Mathematics, School)
"The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture."
- John McLaughlin
(Related: Culture, Mathematics)
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."
- H. L. Mencken
(Related: Forbidden, Mathematics, Now, Physics, Pregnancy, Woman)
"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."
- Maria Montessori
(Related: Beauty, Imagination, Poetry, Science, Logic, Mathematics)
"I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Interest, Literary, Mathematics)
"But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius."
- Marston Morse
(Related: Sister, Genius, Madness, Mathematics)
"Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth."
- Marston Morse
(Related: Beauty, Earth, Infinity, Mathematics, Play, Result, Unconscious)
"Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies."
- Jamie Murphy
(Related: Music, Chess, Mathematics)
"I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959."
- John Forbes Nash, Jr.
(Related: Mathematics, Spring)
"Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Extreme, Language, Logic, Mathematics, Remarkable, Talk)
"As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest."
- Simon Newcomb
(Related: Existence, Interest, Mathematics, May, Navy)
"I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account."
- Simon Newcomb
(Related: Mathematics, Study)
"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
(Related: Mathematics, Result, Theory)
"The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated."
- James Newman
(Related: Infinite, Mathematics)
"It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer."
- James Newman
(Related: Mathematics, Questions, Talking, Validity)
"The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it."
- James Newman
(Related: Being, Mathematics)
"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."
- Richard M. Nixon
(Related: Sympathy, Mathematics, Philosophy)
"Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone."
- Albert J. Nock
(Related: Life, History, Knowledge, Mathematics, Will)
"Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it."
- Camille Paglia
(Related: Art, Nature, Religion, Science, Mathematics, Ritual)
"This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it."
- Roger Penrose
(Related: Trust, Mathematics, Physics)
"Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's."
- Martin Lewis Perl
(Related: Mathematics, Parents)
"I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel."
- Martin Lewis Perl
(Related: Travel, History, Science, Biography, Fiction, Mathematics)
"Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures."
- Jean Piaget
(Related: Logic, Mathematics, Nothing)
"Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Art, Giving, Mathematics, Name)
"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: History, Nature, Science, Development, Desire, Influence, Mathematics)
"How is an error possible in mathematics?"
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Error, Mathematics)
"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics."
- Simeon Poisson
(Related: Life, Mathematics, Teaching)
"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."
- John Pople
(Related: Age, Class, End, Interest, Mathematics)
"I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics."
- John Pople
(Related: Being, Mathematics)
"I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943."
- John Pople
(Related: College, Examination, Mathematics, October, Physics, Trinity, University)
"Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics."
- Robert Quine
(Related: Music, Mathematics, Reading)
"In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics."
- James Rainwater
(Related: Mathematics, Physics, School)
"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Poetry, Being, Delight, Excellence, Man, Mathematics, Sense, Spirit)
"Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Mathematics, Necessity, Word)
"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Mathematics, May, Saying, Talking)
"I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Love, God, Mathematics, Nothing, Universe)
"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
(Related: Science, Work, Time, Mathematics, Principles, Theory)
"What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant."
- James Sanborn
(Related: Mathematics)
"I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural."
- Carl Sandburg
(Related: Time, Work, Hard work, Mathematics)
"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
(Related: Art, Poetry, Music, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy)
"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
- Stendhal
(Related: Hypocrisy, Mathematics)
"Mathematics is the music of reason."
- James Joseph Sylvester
(Related: Music, Mathematics, Reason)
"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
(Related: Life, Music, Dream, Mathematics, May, Reason, Sense)
"The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence."
- James Joseph Sylvester
(Related: Intelligence, Laws, Mathematics, Physics, World)
"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."
- Nikola Tesla
(Related: Mathematics, Reality, Scientists, Today)
"James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he's good with lower mathematics. Don't get me wrong - he's good."
- Don Van Vliet
(Related: Mathematics, Wrong)
"Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned."
- Izaak Walton
(Related: Mathematics, May)
"God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."
- Andre Weil
(Related: God, Devil, Mathematics)
"You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality."
- Hermann Weyl
(Related: Mathematics, Reality, Words)
"Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Mathematics, Problems, Years)
"The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Mathematics)
"It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Work, Day, End, Mathematics)
"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
(Related: Attention, Mathematics, Problems)
"It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Day, Mathematics, May, Present, Proof, Years)
"I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Achievement, Mathematics, Nothing, Sense, Will)
"I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Love, Childhood, England, Mathematics)
"I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Hope, Excitement, Future, Mathematicians, Mathematics, Problems, Will)
"I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about."
- Andrew Wiles
(Related: Mathematics, Thinking, Understanding)
"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
(Related: Life, Science, Genius, Mathematics, Measure)