Quotes About Mathematics

Mais l'idée que le monde entier, y compris les êtres vivants, relève de la mathématique pure, n'est qu'une vue a priori de l'esprit, qui remonte aux cartésiens.

One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

[G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous.

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law.

E. M. Forster's famous advice to "Only connect!" is beginning to look superfluous. A theory in which the building blocks of the Universe are mathematical structures—known as graphs—that do nothing but connect has just passed its first experimental test.

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

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

If Pythagoras were alive today, he would live in the Malibu hills or perhaps Marin County. He'd hang out at health-food restaurants accompanied by an avid following of bean-hating young women with names like Sundance Acacia or Princess Gaia. Or maybe he'd be an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

In 1982, Raphael Nachman, visiting lecturer in mathematics at the university in Cracow, declined the tour of Auschwitz, where his grandparents had died, and asked instead to visit the ghetto where they had lived.

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

Quantum mechanics can be appreciated, to some degree, on a purely qualitative level. But mathematics is what brings its beauty into sharp focus. We have tried to make this amazing body of work fully accessible to mathematically literate nonphysicists.

Therefore O students study mathematics and do not build without foundations.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.

Leonhard Euler

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.

Die Mathematik ist es, die uns vor dem Trug der Sinne schützt und uns den Unterschied zwischen Schein und Wahrheit kennen lehrt.

God made integers, all else is the work of man.

She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

It's called Littlewood's law.

The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.