Mathematician Quotes

Galileo Galilei

Isaac Newton

Archimedes

Nicolaus Copernicus

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Blaise Pascal

Pythagoras

Thou shalt likewise know that according to Law, the nature of this universe is in all things a like.

Any solid lighter than a fluid will, if placed in the fluid, be so far immersed that the weight of the solid will be equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

Sneezing absorbs all the functions of the soul just as much as the [sexual] act, but we do not draw from it the same conclusions against the greatness of man, because it is involuntary; although we bring it about, we do so involuntarily. It is not for the sake of the thing in itself but for another end, and is therefore not a sign of man's weakness, or his subjection to this act.

Good things should be cast in bronze and bad ones cast to the winds.

Galileo Galilei

And as far as hypotheses go, let no one expect anything in the way of certainty from astronomy, since astronomy can offer us nothing certain, lest, if anyone take as true that which has been constructed for another use, he go away from this discipline a bigger fool than when he came to it.

Nicolaus Copernicus

In the Theory of Numbers it happens rather frequently that, by some unexpected luck, the most elegant new truths spring up by induction.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

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

Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

My method to overcome a difficulty is to go round it.

My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this : PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST. The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about theexistence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time,..., or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs.

Bruno de Finetti

Virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.

William A. Dembski

Most convincing to me of the spiritual relations between mathematics and music, is my own very personal experience. Composing in an amateurish way, I get exactly the same elevation from a prelude that has come to me at the piano, as I do from a new idea that has come to me in mathematics.

An advantage could consist not only in a single important advantage but also in a multitude of insignificant advantages.

If we arrive at an equation containing on each side the same term but with different coefficients, we must take equals from equals until we get one term equal to another term. But, if there are on one or on both sides negative terms, the deficiencies must be added on both bides until all the terms on both sides are positive. Then we must take equals from equals until one term is left on each side.

Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered.

Mathematics is the science of the connection of magnitudes. Magnitude is anything that can be put equal or unequal to another thing. Two things are equal when in every assertion each may be replaced by the other.

Hermann Grassmann

Time figures as the mortar which binds the bricks of matter together.

One cannot require that everything shall be defined, any more than one can require that a chemist shall decompose every substance.

The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance...

William Rowan Hamilton

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters — having once tasted of this food they can never give it up.

Leopold Kronecker

Almost everyone has heard that "figures don't lie, but liars can figure." We need statistics, but liars give them a bad name, so to be able to tell the liars from the statisticians is crucial.

Robert Hooke (mathematician)

It turns out that the Romans were champs in making peace. Their motto was that if you want to make peace, you need to prepare for war. They knew game theory.

To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory.

Paul Sophus Epstein

Mathematics is an aspect of culture as well as a collection of algorithms.