Math Quotes

[Benjamin Peirce's] lectures were not easy to follow. They were never carefully prepared. The work with which he rapidly covered the blackboard was very illegible, marred with frequent erasures, and not infrequent mistakes (he worked too fast for accuracy). He was always ready to digress from the straight path and explore some sidetrack that had suddenly attracted his attention, but which was likely to have led nowhere when the college bell announced the close of the hour and we filed out, leaving him abstractedly staring at his work, still with chalk and eraser in his hands, entirely oblivious of his departing class.

~ William Elwood Byerly

He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus.

~ Terry Pratchett

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. [Fermat's] Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this.

~ Andrew John Wiles

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.(Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.)

~ Andrew John Wiles

Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.

~ Antoine Thomson D'abbadie

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

~ Gian-Carlo Rota

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

~ Clifford A. Truesdell

[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.

~ G.h. Hardy

The integrals which we have obtained are not only general expressions which satisfy the differential equation, they represent in the most distinct manner the natural effect which is the object of the phenomenon... when this condition is fulfilled, the integral is, properly speaking, the equation of the phenomenon; it expresses clearly the character and progress of it, in the same manner as the finite equation of a line or curved surface makes known all the properties of those forms.

~ Joseph Fourier

The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.

~ Felix Klein

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the Princeton method of that period was quite effective.

~ Phillip A. Griffiths

God made the integers, all the rest is the work of Man.

~ Leopold Kronecker

Tengo's lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the romance concealed in the questions it posed. Tengo saw admiration in the eyes of several of his female students, and he realized that he was seducing these seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds through mathematics. His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs; theorems sent warm breath into their ears.

~ Haruki Murakami

A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives.

~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster.

~ Haruki Murakami

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

~ Bertrand Russell

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

~ Isaac Asimov

I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower

~ Jacqueline Carey

[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.

~ René Descartes

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

~ Émilie Du Châtelet

Yes, I was a big math and computer geek, that's true. I was driven by the scholastic side of things. For me, it was all about what I could do with math and computers.

~ Brian Acton

Music is not math. It's science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

~ Bruno Mars

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

~ Ronald Graham

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

~ Ginni Rometty

I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.

~ Sally Ride

I was going to go back to college and become a math teacher.

~ Butch Trucks

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

~ Calvin Trillin

If you stop at general math, you're only going to make general math money.

~ Snoop Dogg

In school, my favorite subject was math. That's where I learned to count money.

~ French Montana