Quotes About Mathematics

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

Mathematics doesn't care about those beyond the numbers.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

Every brick laid in the foundation of a life, however meaningfully or haphazardly placed, shaped the whole. He could now see that fact borne out in every branch of study, from mathematics to science, from economics to chemistry. Each part of the equation influenced the whole.

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe.

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. Physical

1 Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally "undefined.

The proof of Euclidean geometry's consistency eluded mathematicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best that was achieved was a proof that Euclidean geometry was consistent as long as arithmetic was consistent.

in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

Hilbert once said, "If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

That's right. Arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent.

So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for its intellectual beauty. But that couldn't last; a self-contradictory theory was so pointless that most mathematicians would drop it in disgust. What truly infuriated Renee was the way her own intuition had betrayed her. The damned theorem made sense; in its own perverted way, it felt right. She understood it, knew why it was true, believed it.

Albert Einstein once said, "Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.

If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

A proof that mathematics is inconsistent, and that all its wondrous beauty was just an illusion, would, it seemed to me, be one of the worst things you could ever learn.

My main concern with the condition of mathematics in high school is that there's a lot of fear involved! Math is not, generally speaking, presented in a fun way. The concepts, as I see them, are fun, and that's the way I'd like to convey them myself.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

For a physicist or a mathematician, the most symmetrical object you could think about would be a sphere, because it looks identical no matter what you do to it, however you rotate it in any given direction.

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.