Mathematics Quotes

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

Mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.

Well, I was always... I used to get 100% in physics and chemistry and mathematics (well, maybe a couple of points off in mathematics), and that was in high school.

MacPherson told me that my theorem can be viewed as blah blah blah Grothendieck blah blah blah, which makes it much more respectable.

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

For me, rhythm is a type of divine mathematics in a way. No matter where you're from, we can all understand the mathematics of rhythm. I try to apply this mathematical thinking to my playing.

I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics.

Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs.

Football is not played on paper, it is played on a pitch. This game is not mathematics and in football, two plus two very rarely equals four - it's usually three or five.

Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

Mathematics is a collection of cheap tricks and dirty jokes.

I'm convinced that imagination is at the heart of everything we do - in art, science, even astrophysics and higher mathematics. Imagination leads us to ask, "What if?"

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

Philosophically, mathematics is not a part of science. Mathematics studies patterns, science studies nature

Mathematics is not a separate entity. It owes a great deal of its power and its beauty to other disciplines.

... a result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs. The Nature of Mathematics

Mathematics is the only instructional material that can be presented in an entirely undogmatic way.

Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

The advance and perfecting of mathematics are closely joined to the prosperity of the nation.

There is an explicit way to define what explicit is.

If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

Mathematics should be fun.

Mathematics is for lazy people.

Doing research in mathematics is frustrating and if being frustrated is something you cannot get used to, then mathematics may not be an ideal occupation for you.

Somebody came up to me after a talk I had given, and say, "You make mathematics seem like fun." I was inspired to reply, "If it isn't fun, why do it?"

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.

The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

All science requires mathematics. [Editors' summary of Bacon's idea, not Bacon's wording.]

Not a lot of people know this, but I'm very good at mathematics. When I was an angry teenager, I used to sit in my room and do quadratic equations to calm myself down.

Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science.

Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.

When we cannot use the compass of mathematics or the torch of experience...it is certain we cannot take a single step forward.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

I feel that what mathematics needs least are pundits who issue prescriptions or guidelines for presumably less enlightened mortals.

A felicitous but unproved conjecture may be of much more consequence for mathematics than the proof of many a respectable theorem.

To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.

It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.

Mathematics is a world created by the mind of men, and mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!

The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.

No Victor, you got it backwards, you should evaluate these integrals non-rigorously if you can, and rigorously if you must.

The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

During the past fifty years, more mathematics has been created than in all previous ages put together.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!

He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.

Education is worth little if it teaches only how to make a living rather than how to make a life.