American Mathematician Quotes

They used Akbar's principles to formulate a version of Islam that could peacefully co-exist with other religions (or so they claimed). An Emperor's Bequest to Islam, their joint 1,300-page doorstopper, spent twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover alone. The fact that they remained practicing Muslims (albeit the liberal, wine-guzzling kind) put their message in high international demand.

Mathematics as we know it and as it has come to shape modern science could never have come into being without some disregard for the dangers of the infinite.

Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves.

Each atom of the Holy Spirit is intelligent, and like all other matter has solidity, form, and size, and occupies space.

It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other.

By slow degrees, the minds of men were cut adrift from their old scholastic moorings and sent forth on the wide sea of scientific inquiry, to discover new islands and continents of truth.

It is now natural for us to try to derive the laws of nature and to test their validity by means of the laws of invariance, rather than to derive the laws of invariance from what we believe to be the laws of nature.

Mathematics, that giant pincers of scientific logic.

Proofs really aren't there to convince you that something is true — they're there to show why it is true.

Andrew M. Gleason

Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered.

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

Chauncey Wright

I coined fractal from the Latin adjective fractus. The corresponding Latin verb frangere means "to break:" to create irregular fragments... how appropriate for our needs!

Benoît Mandelbrot

Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.

The conclusion seems inescapable: that formal logic has to be taken over by the mathematicians. The fact is that there does not exist an adequate logic at the present time, and unless the mathematicians create one, no one else is likely to do so.

Almost everyone has heard that "figures don't lie, but liars can figure." We need statistics, but liars give them a bad name, so to be able to tell the liars from the statisticians is crucial.

Robert Hooke (mathematician)

Mathematics is the science of order and mathematicians seek to identify instances of order and to formulate and understand concepts that enable us to perceive order in complicated situations.

Shlomo Sternberg

We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.

As a professor of mathematics I am practically required by the ethics of the profession to be absent-minded, unmethodical, and inconsistent in many ways fatal to bibliographical excellence.

Louis Charles Karpinski

Looking at numbers as groups of rocks may seem unusual, but actually it's as old as math itself. The word "calculate" reflects that legacy - it comes from the Latin word calculus, meaning a pebble used for counting. To enjoy working with numbers you don't have to be Einstein (German for "one stone"), but it might help to have rocks in your head.

Steven Strogatz

The great mathematicians have acted on the principle "Devinez avant de d6montrer," and it is certainly true that almost all important discoveries are made in this fashion.

It has always puzzled me that so many religious people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn't it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?

Raymond Smullyan

And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

In other words, without a theory, a plan, the mere mechanical manipulation of the numbers in a problem does not necessarily make sense just because you are using Arithmetic!

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber

In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.