Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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..

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

Equations are the lifeblood of applied mathematics and science.

Thomas L. Saaty

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

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.

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

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

Donald Kingsbury

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

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

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

Andrew M. Gleason

The merit of mathematics, in all its forms, consists in its truth; truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by words but by symbols which serve as the world's only universal written language.

David Eugene Smith

Mathematics is whatever mathematicians are doing.

Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self evident things.

Mathematics is the science of order and mathematicians seek to identify instances of order and to formulate and understand concepts that enable us to perceive order in complicated situations.

Shlomo Sternberg

The person who wishes to understand the higher departments of chemistry, or to pursue them in their most interesting relations to the economy of Nature, ought to be well-grounded in elementary mathematics; he will oftener have to refer to arithmetic than algebra, and to algebra than to geometry. But all these sciences lend their aid to chemistry.

The inner force that drives mathematicians isn't to look for applications; it's to understand the structure and inner beauty of mathematics.

William Thurston

Mathematics is an aspect of culture as well as a collection of algorithms.

Mathematics is a cruel profession. Solving a mathematical problem is for most mathematicians an arduous and lengthy process which may take years, even a lifetime. The final conquest of the truth comes, if ever, inevitably tinged with disillusion, soured by the realization of the ultimate irrelevance of all intellectual endeavor.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.