Mathematics Quotes

Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppyyour mathematics is.

~ Leslie Lamport

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.

~ Gary William Flake

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.

~ James Henry Breasted

One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul.

~ Herbert S. Gaskill

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.

~ Danica Mckellar

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

~ John Adams

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

~ Paul Wolfowitz

We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.

~ Nick Lampson

Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.

~ Conrad Wolfram

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

~ Rita Levi-Montalcini

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

~ Margaret Wertheim

We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.

~ Katherine Johnson

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.

~ Sebastian Thrun

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

~ Maria Mitchell

The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.

~ Ada Lovelace

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

~ Roger Bacon

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

~ Sofia Kovalevskaya

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

~ Richard Dawkins

I have passed English medical examinations in Hong Kong... In my youth, I experienced overseas studies. The languages of the West, its literature, its political science, its customs, its mathematics, its geography, its physics and chemistry - all these I have had the chance to study.

~ Sun Yat-Sen

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

~ Daniel Dennett

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics.

~ Jerry Moran

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

~ Stephen Hawking

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

~ Camille Paglia

Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.

~ Colin Camerer

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

~ Brian Greene

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

~ Lisa Randall

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

~ David Chalmers

A report released by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Partnership for New York City predicts that by 2018, there will be 800,000 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs in the United States that require a master's degree or higher - and only around 550,000 American-graduates with this training.

~ Marvin Ammori

I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.

~ Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'

~ Nancy Roman

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

~ David Josiah Brewer

Mathematics is the music of reason.

~ James Joseph Sylvester

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

~ Frank Capra

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

~ Mel Brooks

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

~ James Joseph Sylvester

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

~ Gabriel Marcel

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

~ Gabriel Marcel

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

~ Christopher Columbus

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

~ James Joseph Sylvester