Mathematician Quotes

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.

The triplet of specifications - the product-market scope, the growth vector and the competitive advantage - describes the firm's product-market path in the external environment.

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.

To history we shall adhere no farther, than is sufficient to preserve an unbroken series of methods gradually becoming more exact and extensive; the series beginning with the first rude, though perfectly just, method of James Bernoulli, and ending with Lagrange's exquisite and refined Calculus of Variations.

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

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.

Marston Morse
Marston Morse
Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
John Forbes Nash, Jr.
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.

I am always surprised when a young man tells me he wants to work at cosmology; I think of cosmology as something that happens to one, not something one can choose.

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

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

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

Pierre Boutroux
Pierre Boutroux
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.

Giuseppe Peano
Giuseppe Peano
The notion that the intellect can create meaningful postulational systems at its whim is a deceptive half-truth. Only under the discipline of responsibility to the organic whole, only guided by intrinsic necessity, can the free mind achieve results of scientific value.

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

Tony F. Chan
Tony F. Chan
Science is one aspect of God's presence, and scientists therefore part of the company of His heralds.

Man is what he is, because a spiritual element has entered into, and taken possession of, animal consciousness. This spiritual element is not, according to Christian teaching, divine: but it is capable of entering into relations with God. It can perceive Him: in thought, it can reason as to His nature and actions: in will and feeling, it can serve and love Him, or disobey and fear Him. Such activity shows itself in what we call the working of conscience.

Ernest Barnes
Ernest Barnes
Statistical methods of analysis are intended to aid the interpretation of data that are subject to appreciable haphazard variability.

One thing at least they have not forgotten, that geometry is nothing if it be not rigorous, and that the whole educational value of the study is lost, if strictness of demonstration be trifled with. The methods of Euclid are, by almost universal consent, unexceptionable in point of rigor. Opening Address by the President, Section A

Henry John Stephen Smith
Henry John Stephen Smith
My method to overcome a difficulty is to go round it.

George Pólya
George Pólya
Each atom of the Holy Spirit is intelligent, and like all other matter has solidity, form, and size, and occupies space.

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

And how admirable and rare an ornament, O good God, is mildenesse in a divine? And how much is it to be wished in this age, that all divines were mathematicians? that is men gentle and meeke.

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.

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.