American Mathematician Quotes

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.

Figures may not lie, but statistics compiled unscientifically and analyzed incompetently are almost sure to be misleading, and when this condition is unnecessarily chronic the so-called statisticians may be called liars.

Everybody knows that mathematics is about Miracles, only mathematicians have a name for them: Theorems.

Mathematics is the product of real flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives may reflect the inspiration, the tragic, or the bizarre.

Mathematics deals mainly with realities and stern facts, and it arms those whose life work is beset with physical difficulties. Hence it appeals especially to the leaders of the common people, and it performs a fundamental function in the education of those who aim to excel in overcoming material difficulties.

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.

It was my lot to plant the harpoon of algebraic topology into the body of the whale of algebraic geometry.

Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz
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.

Mathematics is not constrained by mundane reality. It can build castles in the air and concepts in the mind whose beauty, magnificence, and intrigue are as boundless as the ideas themselves.

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
All good teaching must flow from copious sources of knowledge. The shallow fountain cannot emit a vigorous stream.

Concentrate only on the achievements, and ignore the mistakes. When judging a mathematician you should only integrate f+ and ignore the negative part. Perhaps this should apply more generally to all evaluations of your fellow men.

Antoni Zygmund
Antoni Zygmund
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!

To the workaday world the higher ranges of mathematics have been a sealed book; the man who traverses them successfully a magician - a man whose mental occupations awaken mingled feelings of awe and pity, awe that he can soar so high, pity that he wastes his strength in such useless flight.

Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.

Edward G. Begle
Edward G. Begle
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.

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.

It is a curious circumstance that a science so profoundly mathematical as the theory of probability should have originated in the games of chance which occupy the thoughtless and the profligate.

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 stupendous size of the universe hushes thought itself.

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.