Quotes About Mathematics

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

But in spite of the obvious effectiveness of mathematics in physics, I have never heard of a good a prioriargument that the world must be organised to mathematical principles.

I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn't accept?

Depend upon it, he who wishes to win the prize must come on the principle that two and two make four.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

But it is impossible to divide a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into fourth powers, or generally any power beyond the square into like powers; of this I have found a remarkable demonstration. This margin is too narrow to contain it.

The educational highlights I remember were not in the classroom. My father spent a lot of time with me when he could. He taught me how to take square roots, a skill I have retained but do not use often, except to check that I still remember.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Growing up, I was the odd bird. My interest in mathematics, my interest in the world, how I approach things from a scientific standpoint. You're always going to be looked at as a different bird.

Mathematical studies may serve for a pleasant entertainment for those hours which young men are apt to throw away upon their vices.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.

Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.

Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.

No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.

Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.

With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.

'Without the help of mathematics,' the wise man continued, 'the art could not advance and all the sciences would perish.'

Mathematics is man's own handiwork, subject only to the limitations imposed by the laws of thought.

Euler calculated without effort, just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air.