Quotes About Mathematics

Whatever is true is true, but not all truths are necessary truths. It is true that adding two pebbles to two pebbles makes four pebbles; but adding two drops of water to two drops can make one pool (Piaget, 1967d, p. 582). What this means is that the action of adding actual objects together can have alternative outcomes; the sum of adding two and two can be other than four – that is a real possibility, and no contradiction arises from this.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he's got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.

Old Euclid drew a circle On a sand-beach long ago. He bounded and enclosed it With angles thus and so. His set of solemn greybeards Nodded and argued much Of arc and circumference, Diameter and such. A silent child stood by them From morning until noon Because they drew such charming Round pictures of the moon.

I don't know how it is in mathematics, but in life the best proof for something lies in its opposite.

Pythagorean thought was dominated by mathematics, but it was also profoundly mystical.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.

Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.

A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data.

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

The perfection of mathematical beauty is such...that whatsoever is most beautiful and regular is also found to be most useful and excellent.

Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.

Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith... For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.