Mathematics Quotes

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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

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

John Trowbridge

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

James Joseph Sylvester

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

Oliver Heaviside

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

Douglas Hofstadter

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

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 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 and poetry lie, if not on, at least not far from the extremes, the one of systematic and the other of unsystematic thought, and thus are about as far removed as possible one from the other.

Robert Daniel Carmichael

We shall content ourselves with the remark that if mathematics (as is asserted with sufficient reason) only make straight the minds which are without bias, so they only dry up and chill the minds already prepared for this operation by nature.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert

Mathematics then becomes the ladder by which we all may climb into the heaven of perfect insight and eternal satisfaction, and the solution of arithmetic and algebraic problems is connected with the salvation of our souls.

Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.

A discovery in mathematics, or a successful induction of facts, when once completed, cannot be too soon given to the world. But... an hypothesis is a work of fancy, useless in science, and fit only for the amusement of a vacant hour.

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

Only he who knows what mathematics is, and what its function in our present civilization, can give sound advice for the improvement of our mathematical teaching.

Mathematics has a large household and there are always rumors of prospective additions despite her age and her supposed austerity.

George Abram Miller