Mathematical Quotes

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This [experimentation] is the custom—and properly so—in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

Galileo Galilei

The mathematics are the science of form and quantity, mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.

Edgar Allan Poe

In the great majority of mathematical text-books there is a total lack of unity in method and of systematic development of a central theme. Propositions of very diverse kinds are proved by whatever means are thought most easily intelligible, and much space is devoted to mere curiosities which in no way contribute to the main argument.

Bertrand Russell

The mathematical is, so to speak, a superficial science; it builds on a borrowed site, and the principles by aid of which it proceeds, are not its own...

Seneca the Younger

In music, mathematics appears formally, as revelation, as creative idealism. All enjoyment is musical, consequently mathematical. The highest life is mathematics.

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.

Albert Einstein

All certainty which does not consist in mathematical demonstration is nothing more than the highest probability; there is no other historical certainty.

The theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the physical experience of the experimenter cannot lift him into the regions of highest abstraction.

Albert Einstein

In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.

Albert Einstein

One should not forget that the functions, like all mathematical constructions, are only our own creation, and that when the definition with which one begins ceases to make sense, one should not ask, what is, but what is convenient to assume in order that it [remain] significant.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Of a number of variant hypotheses about the same facts, that one is true which shows why facts, which in the other hypotheses remain unrelated, are as they are, i. e., which demonstrates their orderly and rational mathematical connexion.

Johannes Kepler

I have presented principles of philosophy that are not, however, philosophical but strictly mathematical-that is, those on which the study of philosophy can be based. These principles are the laws and conditions of motions and of forces, which especially relate to philosophy.

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical progression...

Thinking for its own sake, as in music! When I have no special problem to occupy my mind, I love to reconstruct proofs of mathematical and physical theorems that have long been known to me. There is no goal in this, merely an opportunity to indulge in the pleasant occupation of thinking.

Albert Einstein

A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim... to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a group of experimental laws.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Thus it would seem that wherever we infer from perceptions, it is only structure that we can validly infer; and structure is what can be expressed by mathematical logic, which includes mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

Bertrand Russell

The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both.

Henry David Thoreau

If I hadn't an absolute faith in the harmony of creation, I wouldn't have tried for thirty years to express it in a mathematical formula. It is only man's consciousness of what he does with his mind that elevates him above the animals, and enables him to become aware of himself and his relationship to the universe.

Albert Einstein

It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.

Albert Einstein

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

G. K. Chesterton

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

The mathematicians are the only happy ones. He who does not reach for a mathematical book with devotion and read it as the word of God does not understand it.