Math Quotes

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.

The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver.

Mathematics is a language

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.

Calculators can only calculate - they cannot do mathematics.

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Math is one of my favorite subjects.

One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method

Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

Someone has remarked that 'An ideal math talk should have one proof and one joke and they should not be the same'.

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

... the notions category and functor were not formulated or put in print until the idea of a natural transformation was also at hand.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I can bear it.

By the end of the first month of the 1995 session, each senator will have made more money than any person who works 40 hours a week at minimum wage for the entire year.

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.

It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.

Mathematical objects are determined by - and understood by - the network of relationships they enjoy with all the other objects of their species.

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.

This paper gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error,however, is not new.

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus.

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.

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

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

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

What is the difference between method and device? A method is a device which you use twice.

I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between.

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

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.

To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.

Mathematics is one of the deepest and most powerful expressions of pure human reason, and, at the same time, the most fundamental resource for description and analysis of the experiential world.

The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

I did math in school, obviously. And I loved all my math teachers.

I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.

...it is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him.