Mathematician Quotes

Lately there have been complaints that the use of the magnitude scale is confusing, or at least the reporting of magnitudes in the newspapers 'confuses the public.

Charles Francis Richter

It is well known that the central problem of the whole of modern mathematics is the study of transcendental functions defined by differential equations.

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

Daniel Bernoulli

Given a conjecture, the best thing is to prove it. The second best thing is to disprove it. The third best thing is to prove that it is not possible to disprove it, since it will tell you not to waste your time trying to disprove it. That's what Godel did for the Continuum Hypothesis.

Some people think that mathematics is a serious business that must always be cold and dry; but we think mathematics is fun, and we aren't ashamed to admit the fact. Why should a strict boundary line be drawn between work and play? Concrete mathematics is full of appealing patterns; the manipulations are not always easy, but the answers can be astonishingly attractive.

I believe the coordinate-free approach fosters the cultivation of intuition, a scarce commodity in relativity because the phenomena this theory is intended to describe are as yet rather remote from our daily experience.

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

The infinitely small neither have nor can have theory; it is a dangerous instrument in the hands of beginners [...] anticipating, for my part, the judgement of posterity, I would dare predict that this method will be accused one day, and rightly, of having retarded the progress of the mathematical sciences.

Francois-Joseph Servois

I think that considerable progress can be made in the analysis of the operations of nature by the scholar who reduces rather complicated phenomena to their proximate causes and primitive forces, even though the causes of those causes have not yet been detected.

There are some current 'theories' that, when divested of begged questions, reduce to the non-controversial statement, 'Here are some facts and there may be some relation between them.'

Harold Jeffreys

There is a largeness about mathematics that transcends race and time: mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.

Herbert Turnbull

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.

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?

The discovery of appropriate variables for biology is itself an act of creation.

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

Richard Dedekind

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.

Science provides the understanding of the universe in which we live. Mathematics provides the dies by which science is molded. Our world is to a large extent what mathematics says it is.

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

Nathaniel Bowditch

It would be rash to say that nothing remains for discovery or improvement even in the elements of mathematics; but it may be safely asserted that the ground has been so long and so thoroughly explored as to hold out little hope of profitable return for a casual adventurer.

Isaac Todhunter

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

Proofs really aren't there to convince you that something is true — they're there to show why it is true.

Andrew M. Gleason

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

The nice thing about mathematics is doing mathematics.

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.

Logic has virtually nothing to do with the way we think.