Quotes About Mathematics

He (Gauss) lives everywhere in mathematics

This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.

In all that galaxy of talent there was no brighter star than Niels Henrik Abel, the man of whom Hermite said, "He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week.

Divide 10 by 1/2 and add ten. What is the answer?

Answer: The answer is 30. There are two tricks in this question. The first is 1 times 0. This is only a distraction. Yes, 1 times 0 is 0, but that doesn't affect anything else in the equation. The second trick is that the lines ending with 1 don't have a + sign next to them. That means they should be combined with the following line. Here are the numbers, all on one line: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 11 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 11 + 1 x 0 + 1 = ? And the answer to that equation is 30.

We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.

I wouldn't have minded school if they taught you important things like how to have good sex and what brand of wine is the best… But for some reason they were hell bent on teaching me algebra

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

Not long ago scientists figured out a way to create mathematical constructs of patients' hearts.

Since algebra derives from the Arabic jabara = to bind together, fractal and algebra are etymological opposites!)

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

People do dollar cost averaging because they have regret of making one big mistake. But the fact of the matter is that, mathematically, the market rises more of the time than it falls. It falls, but it rises more of the time than it falls.

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but, with a little mathematical fiddling, you can show the relationship.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments... in most people's minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do - all these effects that Einstein's theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

The contribution of mathematics, and of people, is not computation but intelligence.

That's not gross; that's one gross. It means there's a hundred and forty-four vuvuzelas in each carton.

Thus the thought, for example, which we expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs no bearer. It is not true for the first time when it is discovered, but is like a planet which, already before anyone has seen it, has been in interaction with other planets.