Mathematical Quotes

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The lure of mathematics is hard to resist. When, by dint of great effort and ingenuity, a previously vague, ill-formed idea is encapsulated in a neat mathematical formulation, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that some profound truth has been discovered.

David Lindley (physicist)

The astronomy which is not mathematical is what is so ludicrously called "Geography of the Heavens" - is not astronomy at all.

The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid's first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.

John Allen Paulos

Strategy means the art of recognizing the main problems, attacking them at their weak points, setting up future lines of advance. Mathematical strategy is concerned with long-range objectives; it requires a deep understanding of broad trends and of the evolution of ideas over long periods.

He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

He that gives a portion of his time and talent to the investigation of mathematical truth, will come to all other questions with a decided advantage over his opponents.

Charles Caleb Colton

Within all conflagrations mathematical things are related.

Strictly speaking it may even be said that nearly all our knowledge is problematical; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means for ascertaining truth - induction and analogy - are based on probabilities.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

The only good science is the knowledge of facts, and mathematical truths are only truths of definition, and completely arbitrary, quite unlike physical truths.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

The origin is a mathematical point, something that has sucked from the concept of a place its essential property, that of being here rather than there, the infinitely extended line itself balanced perfectly on that slim, solitary, and singular spike.

David Berlinski

In a word, the sentiment of mathematical elegance is naught else than the satisfaction due to some, I know not just what, adaptation between the solution just found and the needs of our mind, and it is because of this adaptation itself that the solution becomes an instrument to us.

Henri Poincaré

Symbolic Logic has been disowned by many logicians on the plea that its interest is mathematical, and by many mathematicians on the plea that its interest is logical.

Alfred North Whitehead

The concatenations of mathematical ideas are not divorced from life, far from it, but they are less influenced than other scientific ideas by accidents, and it is perhaps more possible, and more permissible, for a mathematician than for any other man to secrete himself in a tower of ivory.

However much we may feel free, everything that we do is, according to Laplace, completely determined. Indeed the entire cosmos is reduced to a gigantic clockwork mechanism, with each component slavishly and unfailingly executing it preprogrammed instructions to mathematical precision. Such is the sweeping implication of Newtonian mechanics.

A particular danger, I believe, lies in an oversimplified use of mathematical or statistical methods of investigation, in which obviously erroneous results may be obtained by a selection of only a few of many relevant factors to be considered.

Claud William Wright

Whether mathematical simplicity is God's affair or our, the fact remains that this feature more than any other remains the mainspring of progress in the physical sciences.

Without the power of observation, without judgment, without sagacity, all mathematical knowledge is useless.

Justus von Liebig

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

Nowhere is intellectual beauty so deeply felt and fastidiously appreciated in its various grades and qualities as in mathematics, and only the informal appreciation of mathematical value can distinguish what is mathematics from a welter of formally similar, yet altogether trivial statements and operations.

Michael Polanyi

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

As mathematicians navigate their way across the mathematical terrain, it as though all paths will necessarily lead at some point to the same awesome vista of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Marcus du Sautoy

In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught.

Only he who knows what mathematics is, and what its function in our present civilization, can give sound advice for the improvement of our mathematical teaching.

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.

Robert Simpson Woodward