Math Quotes

I am the rain, when I'm on math I make the day horrible that's why the day is horrible, that's why I don't go outside.

~ Deyth Banger

Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would have been baking her a Pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria's eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers.

~ David Klass

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

~ G.h. Hardy

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.

~ Neal Stephenson

Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as her luck has run out and He is due. That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store.

~ Leonard Mlodinow

Math is a Chaos and it doesn't have order <--- what's the purpose of it?

~ Deyth Banger

Math teaches us chaos or order, for god sake?

~ Deyth Banger

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for a very big number.

~ Victor J. Stenger

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

~ Franz Karl Achard

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

~ J.williard Gibbs

[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar astronomy and atomic physics are the only sciences which stand higher in popular estimation.

~ G.h. Hardy

There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.

~ George Boole

I do not think the division of the subject into two parts - into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.

~ Balfour Stewart

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.

~ Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth

...Pff... there is always a reason for everything if you go deeper and deeper under the sea you will die in the same time, even you will drown however you will find the reason. It's about 50 out of 100 which will mean 50% chance you have to live and 50% there is a chance to die.

~ Deyth Banger

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating... The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.

~ Brand Blanshard

All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other, and all means of discovering them are equally admissible.

~ Adrien-Marie Legendre

The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analysis itself and of discovering the elements which it most concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to conserve.

~ Joseph Fourier

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

~ René Descartes

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers.

~ R.m. Arcejaeger

The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to no

~ Rudolf Clausius

I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.

~ Winston S. Churchill

I did the math. (I presume Americans don't pluralise mathematics because they only plan to do it once.)

~ Sheridan Jobbins

We’ll start with an easy one, shall we? What is the secant of three pi?” The troll asked. “Pie?” Toru felt suddenly hungry. “What are you talking about, man, have you gone senile? A sea camp? You mean like the floating city?

~ Noor Al-Shanti

Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.

~ Kate Grenville

Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression - in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.

~ Yōko Ogawa

Really, there was only one problem with Mr. Davis, as far as Gregory was concerned; He taught math.

~ Greg Pincus

REAL MATHEMATICS is not about just computing but it is about figuring out…Figuring out the truthfulness, reasoning behind specific event, patterns, determinism in chaotic processes etc.

~ Mathematician Vitthal Jadhav

You’re probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone’s better at math than I am, but it’s okay, I’m fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things—guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few. By the way, it's apparently true that you'll never use it in the real world. Math, I mean.

~ Jennifer Niven

Math is a very peculiar thing, for in it all numbers have a double but not all have halves.

~ Willa Valentine

Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.

~ Keith J. Devlin

Math is my Passion. Engineering is my Profession.

~ Wilfred James Dolor

Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.

~ Edward Frenkel

This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.

~ Emil Artin

For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning considered the objects themselves so thoroughly and directly as their nature requires, since all is abridged and simplified, as soon as we place ourselves in a right point of view.

~ Louis Poinsot

The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.

~ Joseph Louis François Bertrand

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

~ Benjamin Peirce

Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.

~ Henry Hallett Dale

To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency ... . The Realist position is probably the one which most mathematicians would prefer to take. It is not until he becomes aware of some of the difficulties in set theory that he would even begin to question it. If these difficulties particularly upset him, he will rush to the shelter of Formalism, while his normal position will be somewhere between the two, trying to enjoy the best of two worlds.

~ Paul Cohen