Mathematics Quotes

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Those who have studied mathematics much, and no other science, are apt to grow so fond of them, as to believe that there is no certainty in any other science, nor any other axioms than those of Euclid.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

Mathematics is no more the art of reckoning and computation than architecture is the art of making bricks or hewing wood, no more than painting is the art of mixing colors on a palette, no more than the science of geology is the art of breaking rocks, or the science of anatomy the art of butchering.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

It seems to me that no one science can so well serve to co-ordinate and, as it were, bind together all of the sciences as the queen of them all, mathematics.

Edward Wilson Davis

It is unsafe to talk mathematics. Folks don't understand.

Martin Henry Fischer

Mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations.

The pursuits of the University mathematics preeminently demand self-denial, patience, and perseverance from youth, precisely at that period when they have liberty to act for themselves, and when on account of obvious temptations habits of restraint and application are peculiarly valuable.

Isaac Todhunter

The belief that the underlying order of the world can be expressed in mathematical form lies at the very heart of science. So deep does this belief run that a branch of science is considered not to be properly understood until it can be cast in mathematics.

Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.

Vladimir Nabokov

Mathematics must be cherished and strengthened as a unified, vital branch in the broad river of science; it dares not trickle away in the sand.

Geometry... being a part of mathematics, mother of all knowledge, is also the mother of drawing, which is the father of all the arts.,

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

Eric Temple Bell

The dictum that everything that people do is "cultural" licenses the idea that every cultural critic can meaningfully analyze even the most intricate accomplishments of art and science... It is distinctly weird to listen to pronouncements on the nature of mathematics from the lips of someone who cannot tell you what a complex number is!

Mathematics is to an engineer what anatomy is to a surgeon, what chemistry is to an apothecary, what the drill is to an army officer.

John Alexander Low Waddell

Mathematics afford us no assistance, either in conquering the difficulties, or in avoiding the dangers which we encounter in the great field of probabilities wherein we live and move.

William Hamilton

The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing.

James Roy Newman

His mathematics carried with it a momentary qualm and a lesson. The thought had not occurred to him that the thought could possibly occur to me not to ride at his side on that red road to revenge and justice. It was the higher calculus. I was booked for the trail. I began to eat more beans.

The idea that aptitude for mathematics is rarer than aptitude for other subjects is merely an illusion which is caused by belated or neglected beginners.

Johann Friedrich Herbart

A working mathematician is always a Platonist. It doesn't matter what he says. He may not be a Platonist at other times. But I think that in mathematics he always has that feeling of discovery.

In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths, which existed in the Divine Mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there, when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.

The most important facts of geology do not require, to discover them, any knowledge of mathematics or of chemical analysis; they may be studied in every bank, every grot, every quarry, every railway-cutting, by anyone who has eyes and common sense.

Charles Kingsley

For mathematics is the science of the most complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.

Alfred North Whitehead

The types of mind which result from training in mathematics and in biology certainly differ profoundly; but the difference does not seem to lie in the intellectual faculty.

A single curve, drawn in the manner of the curve of prices of cotton, describes all that the ear can possibly hear as a result of the most complicated musical performances.... That to my mind is a wonderful proof of the potency of mathematics.

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

If we are to teach mathematics at all, real success is not possible unless we know that the subject is beautiful as well as useful.

David Eugene Smith

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.