Quotes On Mathematics
A mathematical truth is neither simple nor complicated in itself, it is. - Emile Lemoine
The science of Pure Mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit - A. N. Whitehead
A mathematician who is not also a poet will never be a complete mathematician. - Karl Weierstrass
I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me. - Goethe
Mathematicians are like lovers... Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another. - Fontenelle
It is easier to square a circle than to get round a mathematician. - Augustus De Morgan
I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer such a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are. - A. N. Whitehead
Numbers rule the Universe. - Pythagoras
Mathematics is the Queen of Science, and Arithmetic the Queen of Mathematics. - C. F. Gauss
Thus number 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 Clerk Maxwell
The different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. - Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland
God made the Integers, all the rest is the work of man. - Leopold Kronecker
Arithmetic is one of the oldest branches, perhaps the very oldest branch, of human knowledge; and yet some of its most abtruse secrets lie close to its tritest truths. - H. J. S. Smith
Let no man ignorant of geometry enter - Sign over Plato's Academy in Athens
There is no royal road to geometry.- Menaechmus to Alexander the Great
He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid (geometry) since he was a member of congress. He began a course of rigid mental discipline with the intent to improve his faculties, especially his powers of logic and language. Hence his fondness for Euclid, which he carried with him on the circuit till he could demonstrate with ease all the propositions in the six books; often studying far into the night, with a candle near his pillow, while his fellow-lawyers, half a dozen in a room, filled the air with interminable snoring.- Abraham Lincoln from Short Autobiography.
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
Examples...show how difficult it often is for an experimenter to interpret his results without the aid of mathematics. - Lord Rayleigh
But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain. - Albert Einstein
Query 64...whether mathematicians have not their mysteries, and what is more, their repugnancies and contradictions? - Bishop Berkeley
To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician. - Bertrand Russell
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics. - Lord Kelvin
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality? - Albert Einstein
Every New body of discovery is mathematical in form because there is no other guidance we can have. - Charles Darwin
The Infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man. - David Hilbert
The notion of infinity is our greatest friend; it is also our greatest enemy of our peace of mind. - James Pierpont
In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-- an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers. - Henri Lebesgue
God ever geometrizes. - Plato
God ever arithmetizes. - Charles Jacobi
The Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. - James Jeans
Ask a philosopher 'What is philosophy?' or a historian 'What is history?' and they will have no difficulty in giving an answer. Neither of them can pursue his own discipline without knowing what he is searching for. But ask a mathematician 'What is mathematics?' and he may justifiably reply that he does no know the answer but that this does not stop him from doing mathematics. - François Lasserre
Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic. - Pierre Boutroux
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth. - Christopher Morley
Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself. - Claude Bragdon
Mathematics possesses not only truth. but some supreme beauty -- A beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. - Bertrand Russell
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics. - George Santanaya
Do not be troubled by your difficulties with Mathematics, I can assure you mine are much greater. - Albert Einstein
No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry. - Benjamin Franklin
The advancement and perfection of mathematics are intimately connected with the prosperity of the state. - Napoleon Bonaparte
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol -- all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics. - John D. Barrow
For it seems to be precisely that science known by the barbarous name Algebra, if we could only extricate it from that vast array of numbers and inexplicable figures by which it is overwhelmed, so that it might display the clearness and simplicity which, we imagine, ought to exist in genuine mathematics. - Rene Descartes
Yes, yes, I know that, Sydney ... Everybody knows that! ... But look: Four wrongs squared, minus two wrongs to the fourth power, divided by this formula, do make a right. - Gary Larson
On the basis of my historical experience, I fully believe that mathematics of the twenty-fifth century will be as different from that of today as the latter is from the sixteenth century. - George Sarton
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. - Charles Darwin
I knew a mathematician who said, "I do not know as much as God, but I know as much as God did at my age." - Milton Shulman
Music is the pleasure of the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. - Gottfried Leibniz
It is hard to convince a high-school student that he will encounter a lot of problems more difficult than those of Algebra and Geometry. - Edgar W. Howe
A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory. - Paul Erdos