Mathematics Quotes

There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else — but persistent.

~ Raoul Bott

In Mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

~ Georg Cantor

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

I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.

~ Malcolm X

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.

~ Yōko Ogawa

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

~ René Descartes

I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.

~ Jordan Ellenberg

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

~ R.m. Arcejaeger

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.

~ C.s. Lewis

Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.

~ Leonhard Euler

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.

~ Michael Crichton

Mathematics is the art of explanation.

~ Paul Lockhart

My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.

~ Georg Cantor

Dividing one number by another is mere computation , knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.

~ Jordan Ellenberg

...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart.

~ Yōko Ogawa

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

~ Richard Dawkins

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.

~ Roger Jones

A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.

~ Bill Gaede

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.

~ Sylvain Cappell

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

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.

~ Ann Patchett

If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy)...

~ Doug Pierce

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

It's a simple matter of mathematics.

~ Jean Lee Latham

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.

~ Richard Preston

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.

~ Nicolaus Copernicus

A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.

~ Bill Gaede

[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.

~ Albert Einstein

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

~ Sheridan Jobbins

Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.

~ Paul Hoffman

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

The impulse to all movement and all form is given by [the golden ratio], since it is the proportion that summarizes in itself the additive and the geometric, or logarithmic, series.

~ Schwaller De Lubicz

The Golden Ratio defines the squaring of a circle. Stated in mathematical terms, this says: Given a square of known perimeter, create a circle of equal circumference. According to some, in ancient Egypt, this mathematical mystery was encoded in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

~ Marja De Vries

It is shown that the golden ratio plays a prominent role in the dimensions of all objects which exhibit five-fold symmetry. It is also showed that among the irrational numbers, the golden ratio is the most irrational and, as a result, has unique applications in number theory, search algorithms, the minimization of functions, network theory, the atomic structure of certain materials and the growth of biological organisms.

~ Richard A. Dunlap

A mathematician is an individual who proves his beliefs with equations.

~ Bill Gaede

...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.

~ Alfred Korzybski

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

Mathematics isn’t just science, it is poetry – our efforts to crystallise the unglimpsed connections between things. Poetry that bridges and magnifies the mysteries of the galaxy. But the signs and symbols and equations sentients employ to express these connections are not discoveries but the teasing out of secrets that have always existed.

~ James Luceno