Quotes About Mathematics

Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation.

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

People think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit, it’s the stuff we CAN understand. It’s cats that are complicated.

An Arab activist can take pride in the Arab heritage of mathematics and science or he can take pride in his religion, and there's pride to be taken in both. But one of them could be exploited much more easily and has been in the context of world conflict. And the other is very difficult to do on the grounds that science and literature and mathematics have been among the uniting factors in the history of the world.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can't really describe - you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference. It is so in almost every art. We just don't understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don't know why. But I say it's certainly true of mathematics.

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 georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.

We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of science are mathematics and logic; the mathematical set puts out the logical eye, the logical set puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it sees better with one eye than with two. Note that De Morgan, himself, only had sight with only one eye.

If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy.

Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.

Except in mathematics, the shortest distance between point A and point B is seldom a straight line. I don't believe in mathematics.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

Mathematics is an obscure field, an abstruse science, complicated and exact; yet so many have attained perfection in it that we might conclude almost anyone who seriously applied himself would achieve a measure of success.

We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.

But Anatole said suddenly, 'Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.' 'What are you telling me?' 'I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.

The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules... One might therefore conjecture that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms.

Nature imitates mathematics.

Mathematics-a wonderful science, but it hasn't yet come up with a way to divide one tricycle between three small boys.

In our civilization, there are permanent forms which are part of every epoch and every culture. They are not especially difficult to detect. A minimal knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and perhaps mathematics, brings to light certain patterns that make these subjects easier to understand. It is striking to see the extreme similarity between these scientific propositions and the forms that recur in all times, places and civilizations.

If there be some who, though ignorant of all mathematics . . . dare to reprove this work, because of some passage of Scripture, which they have miserably warped to their purpose, I regard them not, and even despise their rash judgement.

The heart of mathematics is its problems.

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising.

Of the properties of mathematics, as a language, the most peculiar one is that by playing formal games with an input mathematical text, one can get an output text which seemingly carries new knowledge. The basic examples are furnished by scientific or technological calculations: general laws plus initial conditions produce predictions, often only after time-consuming and computer-aided work. One can say that the input contains an implicit knowledge which is thereby made explicit.

All of mathematics is a tale about groups.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics, a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant. A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. The Foundamental Law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

My occupation is an open question. I was once an assistant professor of mathematics. Since then, I have spent time living in the woods of Montana.

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.

The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics.

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.

What binds us to space-time is our rest mass, which prevents us from flying at the speed of light, when time stops and space loses meaning. In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live "nowhere" and "nowhen"; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

On set, the playground for the character, how much it takes varies. Is it like ballet, is it like jazz? The content always lends itself to the form, and it's really not mathematics.

[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.

There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences.

What science can there be more noble, more excellent, more useful for men, more admirably high and demonstrative, than this of mathematics?

In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.