American Mathematician Quotes

Mathematics, that giant pincers of scientific logic.

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

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 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
Statistical methods of analysis are intended to aid the interpretation of data that are subject to appreciable haphazard variability.

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

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.

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.

Our brains are just not wired to do probability problems very well.

Persi Diaconis
Persi Diaconis
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.

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

Solomon Lefschetz
Solomon Lefschetz
Science is reasoning; reasoning is mathematics; and, therefore, science is mathematics.

Mathematicians makes natural questions precise.

Richard E. Bellman
Richard E. Bellman
In dealing with academics, it is absolutely superb to be able to say you're a mathematician! Nobody dares to say mathematics is not important or not significant... No discipline surpasses mathematics in pure academic prestige.

It is a paradox in mathematics and physics that we have no good model for the teaching of models.

The fundamental importance of the subject of order may be inferred from the fact that all the concepts required in geometry can be expressed in terms of the concept of order alone.

The stupendous size of the universe hushes thought itself.

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.

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

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.