Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.

Alexander Markovich Polyakov

We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we
want to talk "about" mathematics!

Harold Jeffreys

He gave himself diligently to mathematics, which he liked "vastly." "I believe they are useful," he writes, "and I am sure they are entertaining, which is alone enough to recommend them to me."

Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet

It [the mathematician] be asked why he persists on the high glaciers whither no one but his own kind can follow him, he will answer... For the honor of the human spirit. The Future of Mathematics

Ours is an age in which scientists are Wise Men, and the root of this Wisdom is in Mathematics.

Salomon Bochner

Like the great temples of some religions, mathematics may be viewed only from the outside by those uninitiated into its mysteries.

Andrew M. Gleason

One does not know a foreign language unless on is able to think in that language; one does not know mathematics unless one is able to think mathematically.

John Alexander Low Waddell

From dust thou are to dust returneth may perhaps not be spoken of the soul but it is well spoken of earthborn mathematics.

Mathematics is the Queen of Science but she isn't very Pure; she keeps having babies by handsome young upstarts and various frog princes.

Donald Kingsbury

The two main divisions of mathematics, analysis and geometry, correspond with some exactness to the two great mysteries of the Christian faith, the Trinity and the Incarnation. In E.T. Bell

Hilda Phoebe Hudson

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

Modem mathematics is highly artistic. A simple theme is chosen, some conception pretty and charming in itself. Then it is shown that by simply holding this idea up to one's eye and looking through it, a whole forest that before seemed a thick and tangled jungle of bushes and briers is seen to be in reality an orderly garden.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Equations are the lifeblood of applied mathematics and science.

Thomas L. Saaty

At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.

David Berlinski

What is mathematics? I inquire, not about the word, but about the thing. Many have been the answers of former years, but none has approved itself as final. All of them, by nature belonging to the "literature of knowledge," have fallen under its law and "perished by supersession."

Cassius Jackson Keyser

Beauty is very integrated with rarity.... Beauty is connected so much with innovation and priority.... [In mathematics], it has to be something special to make it beautiful. If it's just ordinary, it's not beautiful.

There can be no true physical science which looks first to mathematics for the provision of a conceptual model. Such a procedure is to repeat the errors of the logicians of the middle ages.

Alfred North Whitehead

The lure of mathematics is hard to resist. When, by dint of great effort and ingenuity, a previously vague, ill-formed idea is encapsulated in a neat mathematical formulation, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that some profound truth has been discovered.

David Lindley (physicist)

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

It is all too easy to make some plausible simplifying assumptions, do some elaborate mathematics that appear to give a rough fit with at least some experimental data, and think one has achieved something. The chance of such an approach doing anything useful, apart from soothing the theorist's ego, is rather small..

If we consult reason, experience, and the common testimony of ancient and modern times, none of our intellectual studies tend to cultivate a smaller number of the faculties, in a more partial or feeble manner, than mathematics. This is acknowledged by every writer on education of the least pretension to judgment and experience.

As Durer knew full well, there is a center and final substance in mathematics whose perfect beauty is rational, but rational "in retrospect." The discovery which comes before, those rare moments which elevate man, and the searchings of the heart which come after are not rational. They are groupings filled with wonder and sometimes sorrow.

Kronecker is quoted as saying that in arithmetic God made the integers and man made the rest; in the same spirit we may perhaps say that in physics God made the mathematics and man made the rest.

With even a superficial knowledge of mathematics, it is easy to recognize certain characteristic features: its abstractions, its precision, its logical rigor, the indisputable character of its conclusions, and finally, the exceptionally broad range for its applications.

Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov