Math Quotes

It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.

The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.

All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.

The arithmetical symbols are written diagrams and the geometrical figures are graphic formulas.

Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married.

Wherever there is a number, there is beauty.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.

When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask.

One of the nice things about math and science is it’s obvious, you get the answer or you don’t get the answer.

Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.

Women, girls and young ladies tend to be as good or better at math than boys, but you didn't think that either.

To be a scholar of mathematics you must be born with talent, insight, concentration, taste, luck, drive and the ability to visualize and guess.

The only teaching that a professor can give, in my opinion, is that of thinking in front of his students.

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.

I don't believe in mathematics.

Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.

God ever arithmetizes.

I was x years old in the year x2.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

We need to tap the resource of current and retiring science and math professionals that have both content mastery and the practical experience to serve as effective teachers.

It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

Numerical precision is the very soul of science.

Who would not rather have the fame of Archimedes than that of his conqueror Marcellus?

At the fourth grade level, girls at the same percentages of boys say they're interested in careers in engineering or math or astrophysics, but by eighth grade that has dropped precipitously.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.

The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying.

I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate.

Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.

Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.

Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.

We never know what we are talking about.

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.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.