American Mathematician Quotes

If the sun were created expressly to light and heat the earth, what a waste of energy!

Forest Ray Moulton
Forest Ray Moulton
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.

The dictum that everything that people do is "cultural" licenses the idea that every cultural critic can meaningfully analyze even the most intricate accomplishments of art and science... It is distinctly weird to listen to pronouncements on the nature of mathematics from the lips of someone who cannot tell you what a complex number is!

Consider the Pitiful Plight Of a runner who wasn't too bright, But sprinted so fast He vanished at last By red-shifting himself out of sight.

It is all too easy to notice the statistical sea that supports our thoughts and actions. If that sea loses its buoyancy, it may take a long time to regain the lost support.

Mathematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in properties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that need to be done, let him do it himself.

Mathematics is obviously something that women should be able to do very well. It's very intuitive. You don't need a lot of machinery, and you don't need a lot of physical strength. You just need stamina, and women often have a great deal of stamina.

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

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.

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.

What is mathematics? It has so many different aspects that the difficulties in trying to give a definition are similar to those encountered in trying to determine whether some living organisms are animal or vegetable.

Louis J. Mordell
Louis J. Mordell
Mathematics is the codified body of all logical thought.

George David Birkhoff
George David Birkhoff
The notion that the intellect can create meaningful postulational systems at its whim is a deceptive half-truth. Only under the discipline of responsibility to the organic whole, only guided by intrinsic necessity, can the free mind achieve results of scientific value.

Herbert Robbins
Herbert Robbins
The Riemann Hypothesis (RH) has been around for more than 140 years, and yet now is arguably the most exciting time in its history to be working on RH. Recent years have seen an explosion of research stemming from the confluence of several areas of mathematics and physics.

The characteristic which distinguishes the present-day professional statistician, is his interest and skill in the measurement of the fallibility of conclusions.

Beauty is very integrated with rarity.... Beauty is connected so much with innovation and priority.... [In mathematics], it has to be something special to make it beautiful. If it's just ordinary, it's not beautiful.

Misinforming people by use of statistical material might be called statistical manipulation; in a word (though not a very good one), statisticulation.

Why do I paint? In my work as a mathematician, form, structure, and economy of expression are important. In music, add tone quality, balance and harmony. And now in painting, these aesthetic values are enhanced by color, contrast, and composition.

The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous.

Herbert Wilf
Herbert Wilf
I believe the coordinate-free approach fosters the cultivation of intuition, a scarce commodity in relativity because the phenomena this theory is intended to describe are as yet rather remote from our daily experience.

Walter Noll
Walter Noll
There is hidden order in Nature, to be found only by patient search.

Garrett Birkhoff
Garrett Birkhoff
The stupendous size of the universe hushes thought itself.

I cannot imagine that I shall ever return to the creed of the true Platonist, who sees the world of the actual infinite spread out before him and believes that he can comprehend the incomprehensible.

Abraham Robinson
Abraham Robinson
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!

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.