Quotes About Mathematics

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

All day long I add up columns of figures and make everything balanced. I come home. I sit down. I look at a Kandinsky and it's wonderful.

It never happens that, when we go home and open the refrigerator, we see all infinitely many prime numbers there.

The object of mathematics is the honor of the human spirit.

God exists because arithmetic is consistent - the Devil exists because we can't prove it!

I tell you that studying humanities in high school is more important than mathematics - mathematics is too sharp an instrument, no good for kids.

The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries - how mathematics is one of humanity's long continuous conversations with itself.

There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences.

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

Now I'm not an expert at mathematics, but I calculated it would take at least three of me to take on one third of one of them, even if they were attacking me with just their arse.

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers.

All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.

They [formulae 1.10 - 1.12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.

The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of the imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplestpossible things are imaginary.

Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.

an Arabic word – algebra? It comes from the Arabic al-jabr and it means the reunion of broken parts. I like that, 'the reunion of broken parts': it's poetic, don't you think?

Newton ruled the Royal Society like a tyrant. This led to some ugly incidents. The worst was the fight about who really invented calculus.

This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe. But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it.