Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

"Mathematics" appears to be at the bottom of everything, since we find it unexpectedly where we have not put it in.

Erwin Schrödinger

If the rules of mathematics are rules of grammar, there is no stupidity involved when we fail to see that a mathematical truth is obvious.

Lancelot Hogben

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

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

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

In physics experience can best be sought from mathematics and mechanics, chemistry, and anatomy; in medical practice experience derives most abundantly from the observations of diseases, and from more accurate histories and cures.

Friedrich Hoffmann

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.

The value of [pi] has engaged the attention of many mathematicians and calculators from the time of Archimedes to the present day, and has been computed from so many different formulae, that a complete account of its calculation would almost amount to a history of mathematics.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

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

George Abram Miller

When a branch of mathematics ceases to interest any but the specialists, it is very near its death, or at any rate dangerously close to paralysis, from which it can be rescued only by being plunged back into the vivifying source of the science.

The primary service of modern mathematics is that it alone enables us to understand the vast abstract permanences which underlie the flux of things, without requiring us to regard its self-consistent abstractions as more than specific limited instruments of thought.

George David Birkhoff

All of mathematics can be deduced from the sole notion of an integer; here we have a fact universally acknowledged today.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Percy Williams Bridgman

Proofs knit the fabric of mathematics together, and if a single thread is weak, the entire fabric may unravel.

The application of mathematics to natural phenomena is the aim of all science.

As at present constructed, mathematics reminds one of the loquacious and not always coherent orator, who was said to be able to set his mouth going and go off and leave it.

Percy Williams Bridgman

Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.

Richard Feynman

In mathematics madness often comes with the territory.

Paul Hoffman (English writer)

Mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to other sciences.

The history of arithmetic and algebra illustrates one of the striking and curious features of the history of mathematics. Ideas that seem remarkably simple once explained were thousands of years in the making.

The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated.

James Roy Newman