Mathematician Quotes

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

I think I perceive or remember something but am not sure; this would seem to give me some ground for believing it, contrary to Mr. Keynes' theory, by which the degree of belief in it which it would be rational for me to have is that given by the probability relation between the proposition in question and the things I know for certain.

Frank P. Ramsey

Mathematics is the product of real flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives may reflect the inspiration, the tragic, or the bizarre.

William Dunham (mathematician)

If the sun were created expressly to light and heat the earth, what a waste of energy!

Forest Ray Moulton

Mathematics directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars.

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.

Seismology has lifted our notions about the interior of our planet from the realm of wild speculation to the stage of scientific measurement and well-reasoned inferences.

Keith Edward Bullen

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.

The theory of probability as mathematical discipline can and should be developed from axioms in exactly the same way as Geometry and Algebra.

Andrey Kolmogorov

The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.

All good teaching must flow from copious sources of knowledge. The shallow fountain cannot emit a vigorous stream.

Charles Davies (professor)

I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.

Jordan Ellenberg

Mathematics is obviously something that women should be able to do very well. It's very intuitive. You don't need a lot of machinery, and you don't need a lot of physical strength. You just need stamina, and women often have a great deal of stamina.

Mary Ellen Rudin

Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic.

Pierre Boutroux

Nature might be somehow more powerful than a digital computer.

Aviezri Fraenkel

What is mathematics? It has so many different aspects that the difficulties in trying to give a definition are similar to those encountered in trying to determine whether some living organisms are animal or vegetable.

Louis J. Mordell

It seems certain that there is a limit to the amount of living mathematics that humanity can sustain at any time. As new mathematical specialties arise, old ones will have to be neglected.

Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [...] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.

James H. Wilkinson

Math never gets into the story.... Everyone else gets the credit.

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

Mathematics is the Queen of Science but she isn't very Pure; she keeps having babies by handsome young upstarts and various frog princes.

Donald Kingsbury

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

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

Mathematics is not constrained by mundane reality. It can build castles in the air and concepts in the mind whose beauty, magnificence, and intrigue are as boundless as the ideas themselves.

Michael Starbird

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.