Quotes About Mathematics

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

I give haircut to my son. I have made him learn mathematics table. I have also made him learn some spellings and grammar. I feel lockdown has made me more responsible as a mom.

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

The wonderful thing about maths is it's a totally logical subject, and a pathway has been marked out. I think a lot of these things can be crystallised in something quite essential, that people can get. If I can't explain it, I realise that's probably because I don't completely understand it myself.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

It is very humbling to receive the Fields Medal. The words of a Fields Medallist carry a lot of weight within mathematics - for instance, in framing future directions of research - which means that I have to watch what I say more carefully now!

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

I make fractals. They're like mathematical pictures. My stepdad is actually a rocket scientist, so in his free time, he gave me a fractal program for fun. He showed me how to use it when I was about nine or 10, and I made thousands of fractals.

If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

I've always been passionate about geometry and the study of three-dimensional forms.

I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.

Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

You sit men and women down and give them a maths test, and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.

The science of mathematics treats its object as though it were something abstracted mentally, whereas it is not abstract in reality.

But aside from Willy's skill at learning another language which his father did not know enough to appreciate, his only distinction in schooling was mathematics. Numbers came easily to him. And it was not just simple mathematics but anything that was curious. Many nights in bed he pondered numbers.

For he by geometric scale,Could take the size of pots of ale.

And wisely tell what hour o' th' dayThe clock doth strike, by algebra.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

Round numbers are always false.

All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man;" which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing.