Mathematics Quotes

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.

Mathematics may, like poetry or music, "promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind."

The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.

As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game

The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.

The manuscript looks chaotic, even by mathematics standards.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.

On the basis of my historical experience, I fully believe that mathematics of the 25th century will be as different from that of today as the latter is from that of the 16th century.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.

Mathematics are one of the fundamentaries of educationalizing our youth.

The lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal or a challenge, it is hard to decide which.

Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.

We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we want to talk "about" mathematics!

When we talk about the impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, [Mandelbrot] is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.

The main application of Pure Mathematics is to make you happy.

Inspiration is constantly in the air. It's up to us to develop the sensitivity to pick up on it.

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

I write rhymes with addition and algebra, mental geometry.

Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists.

When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

Mathematics speaks to the transcendental, as does this extraordinary friendship. A beautiful book!

From nothing I have created another entirely new world.

I love music. I do play. It's like mathematics, and it's also emotional. It's nice to play, for no other reason than just to play.

Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.

This method of deduction ... is often called "combinatory". Its usefulness is not exhausted at this stage, but it does even at the outset lead to some valuable conclusions.

A mathematical point is the most indivisble and unique thing which art can present.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

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

Examples ... which might be multiplied ad libitum, show how difficult it often is for an experimenter to interpret his results without the aid of mathematics.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle.

Amanda is now a tenure-track professor at Yale.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

I liked science. I wasn't mathematically oriented, so I became an organic chemist.