Mathematician Quotes

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

William A. Dembski

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

George W. Snedecor

In science nothing capable of proof ought to be accepted without proof.

Richard Dedekind

Equations are the lifeblood of applied mathematics and science.

Thomas L. Saaty

What is familiar to professional scientists highly needs to be placed in the public domain.

Jacques Babinet

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.

Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define.

Mathematics... is a bit like discovering oil... But mathematics has one great advantage over oil, in that no one has yet... found a way that you can keep using the same oil forever.

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.

God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of the microwave radiation.

Knot theory for a long time was a little backwater of topology.

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

By slow degrees, the minds of men were cut adrift from their old scholastic moorings and sent forth on the wide sea of scientific inquiry, to discover new islands and continents of truth.

Mathematics is a human activity almost as diverse as the human mind itself.

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

With the exception of the geometric series, there does not exist in all of mathematics a single infinite series whose sum has been determined rigorously.

Niels Henrik Abel

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.

For it is no part of the business of an astronomer to know what is by nature suited to a position of rest, and what sort of bodies are apt to move, but he introduces hypotheses under which some bodies remain fixed, while others move, and then considers to which hypotheses the phenomena actually observed in the heavens will correspond.

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...

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

Paul Sophus Epstein

Can the difficulty of an exam be measured by how many bits of information a student would need to pass it? This may not be so absurd in the encyclopedic subjects but in mathematics it doesn't make any sense since things follow from each other and, in principle, whoever knows the bases knows everything. All of the results of a mathematical theorem are in the axioms of mathematics in embryonic form, aren't they?

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)

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

If we have a certain class of objects and a certain class of relations and if the only questions which we investigate are whether ordered groups of these objects do or do not satisfy the relations, the results of the investigations are called mathematics.

Mathematics, that giant pincers of scientific logic.