Quotes About Mathematics

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years.

To know what is real, one must subject one's ideas to the rigorous, error-correcting mechanism of science, seeking verification that can be expressed mathematically.

When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.

37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.

I'm obviously attuned to pick up mathematics whenever I can see it. But in Mozart there is a lot of conscious use of mathematical symbolism and numbers in order to try and give messages.

Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.

In other countries you can do high-level maths or general maths, whereas we've just got all-or-nothing. We need to give people another option from 16-18. Not everyone is going to want to become a rocket scientist but that doesn't mean that maths isn't extremely useful.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

Primes are the important main ingredient of numbers, for every number is either a prime or a product of primes.

Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.

The reason the gifted students of the world like Khan Academy is because we don't say, 'Memorize this formula,' but say, 'Let's try to derive it from core principles,' or, 'I forgot my trig identity, so I'm going to just try to prove this to you.'

How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics, not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.

I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.

My dad is a mathematician; I think we both have that problem-solving, looking-for-patterns way of thinking.

Trying to explain Turing's work in encryption and decryption? It's complicated.

I'm the 'Dear Abby' of math problems. But if you understand something, shouldn't you be able to explain it? Isn't that the whole point?

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

On good days, I've done bubbles with as many as 38 faces - a row of pentagons, a row of hexagons, and another row of pentagons on bottom.

I think the biggest thing that I learned, and why I've fallen in love with baseball, is how mental of a game it is. It's such a mental sport, and it's beautiful. I think definitely the mental aspect, the stats, and the mathematics, that, to me, really blew me away.

In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.