Quotes About Mathematics

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.

Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

When the difficulty of a problem lies only in finding out what follows from certain fixed premises, mathematical methods furnish invaluable wings for flying over intermediate obstructions.

The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.

Geometry is one of the handles of science and philosophy.

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

... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics.

Here is something Category-Theorists like: it is trivial, but not trivially trivial.

As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.

Mathematical physics is in the first place physics and it could not exist without experimental investigations.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

As for explaining mathematical phenomena it opens the question: explaining to whom? humans?, other computers?

I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.

Real numbers are good if you add the word 'random'.

Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs.

If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

Philosophically, mathematics is not a part of science. Mathematics studies patterns, science studies nature

It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.