Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem.

Harold Davenport

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Robert C. Merton

Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it; astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.

Miguel de Unamuno

There are two ways to teach mathematics. One is to take real pains toward creating understanding visual aids, that sort of thing. The other is the old British system of teaching until you're blue in the face.

John von Neumann

Some years ago, after I had given a talk, somebody said, "You seem to make mathematics sound like so much fun." I was inspired to reply, "If it isn't fun, why do it?" I am proud of the sentiment, even if it is overstated.

Ralph P. Boas Jr.

Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Historically, it was Euclidean geometry that, developed to a large extent as a votive offering to the God of Reason, opened men's eyes to the possibility of design and to the possibility of uncovering it by the pursuit of mathematics.

I know of nothing which acts as such a powerful antidote that which I ventured to call "opinionatedness," as a study of mathematics.

David Eugene Smith

To think right - that is no characteristic striving of a class of men. It is a common aspiration. Only, the stuff of thought is mostly intractable, formless, like some milky way waiting to be analysed into distinct star-forms of definite ideas. All thought aspires towards the character and condition of mathematics.

John Maynard Keynes

Mathematics... is nothing more than a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on a paper.

Mathematics is to nature as Sherlock Holmes is to evidence.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

Mathematics is a world created by the mind of man, and the mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

Charles Williams (British writer)

It is a certain fact, that, in mathematicians who have confined their studies to mathematics alone, there has often been observed a proneness to that species of religious enthusiasm in which imagination is the predominant element, and which, like a contagion, is propagated in a crowd.

Mathematics is the predominant science of our time; its conquests grow daily, though without noise; he who does not employ it for himself, will some day find it employed against himself.

Johann Friedrich Herbart

Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing anymore about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science.

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Mathematics is nourished by dreamers — as it nourishes them...

John von Neumann

Beyond the little arithmetic required for the ordinary economies of life, the mass of college-bred men, unless engaged in the business of instruction or in pursuits which directly involve their application, from the time they leave their places of education, of whatever name, give up the Mathematics as a useless and hopeless abstraction.

Their [mathematics and science] combined scope is the two-fold world of the Actual and the logically Possible.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

Charles Sanders Peirce

The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Mathematics is merely an auxiliary of science, an appendix to Physics.

Gabriel Jean Edmond Séailles

Working by calculations, engineers employ geometrical forms, satisfying our eyes by their geometry and our understanding of their mathematics; their work is one the direct line of good art.

Mathematics suffers much, but most of all from its teachers.