Quotes About Mathematics

James Clark Maxwell

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I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.

Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.

The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

The usefulness of mathematics allows us to build spaceships and investigate the geometry of our universe. Numbers may be our first means of communication with intelligent alien races. Some physicists have even speculated that an understanding of higher dimensions and of topology-the study of shapes and their interrelationships-may someday allow us to escape our universe, when it ends in either great heat or cold, and then we could call all of space-time our home.

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Our generation is witness to a development of physical knowledge such as has not been seen since the days of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and mathematics has scarcely ever experienced such a stormy epoch. Mathematical thought removes the spirit from its worldly haunts to solitude and renounces the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. But as recompense, mathematics is less bound to the course of worldly events than physics.

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

By refraining from reducing multiplication to addition we are enabled through these axioms to banish continuity, which is so difficult to fix precisely, from the logical structure of geometry.

If Hilbert's view prevails over intuitionism, as appears to be the case, then I see in this a decisive defeat of the philosophical attitude of pure phenomenology, which thus proves to be insufficient for the understanding of creative science even in the area of cognition that is most primal and most readily open to evidence – mathematics.

With mathematics we stand precisely at that intersection of bondage and freedom that is the essence of the human itself.

Or, we may use Cartesian co-ordinate systems from the outset:

We must here follow the first course so as to be able to pass on later to generalisations which extend beyond the limits of Euclidean geometry.

know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.

AM I know my days are numbered, but not every day is a real number.

The hunger angel approached everyone, without restraint. He knew that where things can be unloaded, other things can be loaded. In terms of mathematics, the results could be horrifying: if each person has his own hunger angel, then every time someone dies, a hunger angel is released.

To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.