Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to "Relativity." It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth.

Vladimir Nabokov

Logic like mathematics, seems to tell me too little about things. It does not enlarge my knowledge of man or nature; and those are what I thirst for.

Charles Kingsley

In this quest for simplification, mathematics stands to computer science as diamond mining to coal mining. The former is a search for gems.... The latter is permanently involved with bulldozing large masses of ore - extremely useful bulk material.

Jacob T. Schwartz

It may be more important in the mathematics class how you teach than what you teach.

I propose to address to you a few remarks, necessarily fragmentary and incomplete, upon the scope and tendencies of modern mathematics.

There is as great a distinction between mathematics and the mathematical sciences as there is between induction and the inductive sciences. Practically, few cases of induction do not involve, to a greater or less extent, deductions; so few mathematical processes do not involve some strictly logical procedure.

Charles Carroll Everett

Formalized mathematics, to which most philosophizing has been devoted in recent years, is in fact hardly to be found anywhere on earth or in heaven outside the texts and journals of symbolic logic.

In the house of mathematics there are many mansions and of these the most elegant is projective geometry. Projective Geometry

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

Mathematics has been trivialized, derived from indubitable, trivial axioms in which only absolutely clear trivial terms figure, and from which truth pours down in clear channels.

Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.

The business of concrete mathematics is to discover the equations which express the mathematical laws of the phenomenon under consideration; and these equations are the starting point of the calculus, which must obtain from them certain quantities by means of others.

The domain of mathematics is the sole domain of certainty.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y. Then y goldfish is your starting population for the following year... Your value for y becomes your next value for x. The question is what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It's called an algorithm.

Mathematics exists solely for the honour of the human mind.

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

The pseudomath is a person who handles mathematics as the monkey handled the razor.

Augustus De Morgan

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first but later on.

Oliver Heaviside

Mathematics rests on numbers but is not limited to them.

Mathematics is of profound significance in the universe, not because it exhibits principles that we obey, but because it exhibits principles that we impose.

Dirk Jan Struik

The true method of forecasting the future of mathematics lies in the study of its history and its present state.

Henri Poincaré

I am sure that no subject loses more than mathematics by any attempt to dissociate it from its history.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

For mathematics hoch — hoch — hoch [hip, hip hooray]

It can, you see, be said, with the same approximation to truth, that the whole of science, including mathematics, consists in the study of transformations or in the study of relations.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.