Quotes About Mathematics

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

I received my high school baccalaureate diploma in Latin and Science in 1928, then my two baccalaureate diplomas in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1929.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

I don't feel any different than I did when I was 40. But I realize mathematically, I'm equidistant between that and 80. I'll keep doing this for a while, but I'm not going to be one of these people who hang on just for the sake of being on the air.

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

When I entered Harvard, my background was mostly combinatorics and algebra.

There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven't discovered.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

La libertad es poder decir libremente que dos y dos son cuatro. Si se concede esto, todo lo demás vendrá por sus pasos contados.

Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

Freedom is freedom to say that two plus two is four

La libertad consiste en decir que dos y dos son cuatro.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.

Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.

Twenty-four plus two,           Will

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.

Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tactics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as habits of life.