Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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!

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

Eric Temple Bell

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

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.

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

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.

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

It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics.... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.

Many pages have been expended on polemics in favor of rigor over intuition, or of intuition over rigor. Both extremes miss the point: the power of mathematics lies precisely in the combination of intuition and rigor.

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.

The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.

It is only through Mathematics that we can thoroughly understand what true science is. Here alone can we find in the highest degree simplicity and severity of scientific law, and such abstraction as the human mind can attain. Any scientific education setting forth from any other point is faulty in its basis.

Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.

Frederick Seitz

Mathematics is slow of growth and only reaches the truth by long and devious paths, that the way to its discovery must be prepared for long beforehand, and that then the truth will make its long-deferred appearance as if impelled by some divine necessity.

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

Mathematics... the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

G. Stanley Hall