British Mathematician Quotes

Isaac Newton

G. H. Hardy

Freeman Dyson

David Brewster

Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet

Augustus De Morgan

James Jeans

From the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

The unity of mathematics... is often invoked in a rather imprecise way.

Whether any other Mathematician will appear, possessing sufficient leisure, patience, and facility of computation, to calculate the value of [pi] to a still greater extent, remains to be seen: all that the Author can say is, he takes leave of the subject for the present...

We behold indeed, in the motions of the celestial bodies, some effects of [the attraction] that may be call'd more august or pompous. But methinks these little hyperbolas, form'd by a fluid between two glass planes, are not a-whit less fine and curious than the spacious ellipses describ'd by the planets, in the bright expanse of Heaven.

I am always surprised when a young man tells me he wants to work at cosmology; I think of cosmology as something that happens to one, not something one can choose.

William McCrea (astronomer)

Three shifts can be detected over time in the understanding of mathematics itself. One is a shift from completeness to incompleteness, another from certainty to conjecture, and a third from absolutism to relativity.

Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls, And so on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

Proof, being the highest level of reproduction activity, has an important interiorization aspect: as Yuri Manin stresses in his book Provable and Unprovable, a proof becomes such only after it is accepted (as the result of a highly rigorous process)... Manin describes the act of acceptance as a social act; however, the importance of its personal, psychological component can hardly be overestimated.

Alexandre Borovik

At the present time our actions are largely influenced by our theories. We have abandoned the simple and instinctive mode of life of the earlier civilisations for one regulated by the assumptions of our knowledge and supplemented by all the devices of intelligence.

Charles Howard Hinton

Change is a perichoretical synechy of pamparallagmatic and porroteroporeumatical differentiations and integrations.

Although the prime numbers are rigidly determined, they somehow feel like experimental data.

Not only the laws of nature, but also the events occurring in nature, the world itself, must appear the same to all observers, wherever they may be.

Edward Arthur Milne

To make every event depend upon the twinkling of a star, is an absurdity equal to that of the Lapland witches, who pretend to regulate the course of the winds by tying knots in a string.

John Bonnycastle

Truth is an absolute notion that science, which is not concerned with any such permanency, had better leave alone.

A new idea may be likened to a new-born babe: it is to be carefully nurtured and given every consideration rather than attacked with the choking diet of a multitude of so-called facts because it cannot prove at once that it will one day grow into a Samson.

Raymond Lyttleton

Relativity without mathematics may be compared with "Painless Dentistry," or "Skiing without Falling," or "Reading without Tears."

It seems to me highly improper to introduce God to solve our scientific problems.

William B. Bonnor

Mathematics often owes more to those who ask questions than to those who answer them. The solution of a problem may stifle interest in the area around it. But "Fermat's Last Theorem", because it is not yet a theorem, has generated a great deal of "good" mathematics, whether goodness is judged by beauty, by depth or by applicability.

Science is one aspect of God's presence, and scientists therefore part of the company of His heralds.

Charles Coulson

Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility - a small beginning that must be nurtured, developed, engineer, tinkered with, championed, tested, implemented and checked ideas have no value until they are implemented.

John Alan Robinson

There are some current 'theories' that, when divested of begged questions, reduce to the non-controversial statement, 'Here are some facts and there may be some relation between them.'

Harold Jeffreys

[The Riemann] zeros did not appear to be scattered at random. Riemann's calculations indicated that they were lining up as if along some mystical ley line running through the landscape.

Marcus du Sautoy

Mathematics is a product - a discovery - of the human mind. It enables us to see the incredible, simple, elegant, beautiful, ordered structure that lies beneath the universe we live in. It is one of the greatest creations of mankind - if it is not indeed the greatest.

First they said my [cyclol] structure [of proteins] couldn't exist. Then when it was found in Nature they said it couldn't be synthesized in a laboratory. Then when it was synthesized they said it wasn't important anyway.

Dorothy Maud Wrinch

I am almost inclined to coin a word and call the appearance fluorescence, from fluor-spar, as the analogous term opalescence is derived from the name of a mineral.

Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet