Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Mathematics Quotes



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

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Albert Einstein

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

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Albert Einstein

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams

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

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.
Francis Bacon


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

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.
Danica McKellar

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell

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

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

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

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

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
Charles Caleb Colton

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Richard M. Nixon

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Montessori

I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.
Danica McKellar

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.
Danica McKellar

I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous, which is acting, and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics, and I think math is the cat's meow.
Danica McKellar





My main concern with the condition of mathematics in high school is that there's a lot of fear involved! Math is not, generally speaking, presented in a fun way. The concepts, as I see them, are fun, and that's the way I'd like to convey them myself.
Danica McKellar

At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.

Danica McKellar

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college.

Danica McKellar

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

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

Stephen Hawking

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

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
Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
Camille Paglia

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.
Nicolaus Copernicus

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
Stendhal

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

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

You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics.
Mos Def

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare

How is an error possible in mathematics?
Henri Poincare

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

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

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Galileo Galilei

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


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

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

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

And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics.

William Joyce

"Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

E. T. Bell

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

Charles Babbage

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

Andrew Wiles
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

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

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
Andrew Wiles

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

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

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

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

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

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.
Christopher Columbus

God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
Paul Dirac

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

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

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



Mathematics was hard, dull work. Geography pleased me more. For dancing I was quite enthusiastic.
John James Audubon


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


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

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

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra

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

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.
Georg Cantor

Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions.
Felix Klein

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.
E. T. Bell

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
Jean Piaget

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

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

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.
Arthur Eddington

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

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

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.
Stephen Cole Kleene

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

I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.
Stephen Cole Kleene

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

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
Martin Lewis Perl


Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.
Robert Quine

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics.
Jerry Moran

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

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
David Hilbert

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.
David Hilbert

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

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.
Andre Weil
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

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

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

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

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.

Izaak Walton

The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.

John McLaughlin

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

Godfrey Harold Hardy

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

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

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

E. T. Bell

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

E. T. Bell

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

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

Rudolph A. Marcus


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

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius.
Marston Morse

Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.
Gabriel Marcel

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.
Gabriel Marcel

I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.
Walter Kohn

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
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

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

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

Frank Capra

The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.

James J. Gibson

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

I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.

John Henry Carver

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.

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

The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated.

James Newman

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

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

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

G. H. Hardy

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



For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Roger Bacon

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

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.
George Boole

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

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

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

Mathematics is the music of reason.
James Joseph Sylvester
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

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

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.

Georg Cantor

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

Felix Klein

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.

James Rainwater

Mathematics is as old as Man.

Stefan Banach

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.

Stefan Banach

There's something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time.

Andy Wachowski

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

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

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

We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.

Charles Hermite

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Hermann Weyl 


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