Mathematics Quotes

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The study of mathematics is like climbing up a steep and craggy mountain; when once you reach the top, it fully recompenses your trouble, by opening a fine, clear, and extensive prospect.

Mathematics and poetry move together between two extremes of mysticism, the mysticism of the commonplace where ideas illuminate and create facts, and the mysticism of the extraordinary where God, the Infinite, the Real, poses the riddles of desire and disappointment, sin and salvation, effort and failure, question and paradoxical answer.

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.

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.

Mathematics is the one subject in which time is irrelevant.

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

G. Stanley Hall

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 has this peculiarity, that it is not understood by non-mathematicians.

This is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put "common sense" where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labeled "discarded nonsense."

Eric Temple Bell

Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

Ere long mathematics will be as useful to the chemist as the balance.

Marcel-Paul Schützenberger

I would rather be a dreamer without mathematics, than a mathematician without dreams.

David Eugene Smith

Because observations are all we have, we take them seriously. We choose hard data and the framework of mathematics as our guides, not unrestrained imagination or unrelenting skepticism, and seek the simplest yet most wide-reaching theories capable of explaining and predicting the outcome of today's and future experiments.

In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.

There is a common tendency to consider mathematics so strange, subtle, rigorous, difficult and deep a subject that if a person is a mathematician he is of course a "great mathematician" — their being, so to speak, no small giants. This is very complimentary, but unfortunately not necessarily true.

Mathematics and measurement are not to be unduly worshipped, nor can they be neglected by even the lay observer.

James Bryant Conant

Mathematics is not, never was, and never will be, anything more than a particular kind of language, a sort of shorthand of thought and reasoning. The purpose of it is to cut across the complicated meanderings of long trains of reasoning with a bold rapidity that is unknown to the mediaeval slowness of the syllogisms expressed in our words.

Charles Nordmann

"But I can prove it by mathematics, quite irrefutably. I can prove anything you require of me by whatever means you may prefer," said Jurgen, modestly, "for the simple reason that I am a monstrous clever fellow."

James Branch Cabell

In mathematics rigor is not everything, but without it there would be nothing; a demonstration which is not rigorous is void.

Henri Poincaré

Mathematics gives to science its innermost unity and cohesion, which can never be entirely replaced with props and buttresses or with roundabout connections, no matter how many of these may be introduced.

The problems of mathematics are not isolated problems in a vacuum; there pulses in them the life of ideas which realize themselves in concerto through our human endeavors in our historical existence, but forming an indissoluble whole transcend any particular science.