Mathematics Quotes

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Probably no other department of knowledge plays a larger part outside its own narrower domain than mathematics. Some of its more elementary conceptions and methods have become part of the common heritage of our civilization, interwoven in the every-day life of the people.

It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.

The mathematics lead us to lay out of account all that is not proved; while the primitive truths, those which sentiment and genius apprehend, are not susceptible of demonstration.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

In every new and growing science there are many working hypotheses that never attain to any sort of reality. On the other hand, in the old and abstract sciences of mathematics, where it is hard to tell how much is mere definition or convention, the problem of reality is not so much doubtful as it is meaningless.

Gilbert N. Lewis

The lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal or a challenge, it is hard to decide which.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Mathematics is very much like poetry... what makes a good poem — a great poem — is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this insense formulas like e + 1 = 0...are poems.

The liver!.that great maroon snail... No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

Everybody knows that mathematics is about Miracles, only mathematicians have a name for them: Theorems.

Douglas Hofstadter

"Mathematics is gibberish." Little need be said about this statement. It is only worthy of the utterly illiterate.

Oliver Heaviside

Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation.

James Joseph Sylvester

Mathematical problems in physics have their place in teaching; but physics should not be made a means of teaching mathematics.

John Trowbridge

The whole history of the development of mathematics has been a history of the destruction of old definitions... old hobbies, old idols.

David Eugene Smith

I disagree with Adler, who wrote (in the New Yorker) that there is no point in being a mathematician unless you can be a great mathematician. That's nonsense. Mathematics is like a Gothic cathedral. If you can build a little part of it, it is there - forever - in some sense. At least I have the illusion that it is so.

Computer science, a new addition to the fraternity of sciences, confronts its older brothers, mathematics and engineering, with an adolescent brashness born of rapid, confident growth and perhaps also of enthusiastic inexperience.

Jacob T. Schwartz

Mathematics is not a complete and perfected body of doctrine which one goes to seek in the scriptures whenever one has need of it.

The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can be nowhere else so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics.

John Fiske (philosopher)

Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.

To the workaday world the higher ranges of mathematics have been a sealed book; the man who traverses them successfully a magician - a man whose mental occupations awaken mingled feelings of awe and pity, awe that he can soar so high, pity that he wastes his strength in such useless flight.

Clarence Abiathar Waldo

To find the simple in the complex, the finite in the infinite - that is not a bad description of the aim and essence of mathematics.

Jacob T. Schwartz

To be told that mathematics is good training for the mind does not insure either the intelligent or ardent pursuit of this branch of science.

Mathematics and beauty are the foundation stones of the universe. No one who has studied the forces of nature can doubt that the world about us is a manifestation of something very, very clever indeed.

Sooner or later the cold plunge into pure abstraction must be taken if one is to learn to swim in mathematics and to reason as rational, thinking human beings do.

Eric Temple Bell

Thus geology is (or ought to be), in popular parlance, the people's science - the science by studying which, the man ignorant of Latin, Greek, mathematics, scientific chemistry, can yet become - as far as his brain enables him - a truly scientific man.

Charles Kingsley

The statistical method is social mathematics par excellence.

Eric Temple Bell

I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe.

Clifford A. Pickover