Mathematics Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

Albert Einstein

Cunning in music and mathematics, To instruct her fully in those sciences, Whereof, I know, she is not ignorant.

William Shakespeare

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics. In Morris Kline

Astronomy and Pure Mathematics are the magnetic poles toward which the compass of my mind ever turns.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Ideas in mathematics are a sure ground of certainty; and yet everyone may not make so right an use of them, as to attain to certainty by them: but yet anyone's failing of certainty by them, is not the overturning of this truth, that certainty is to be had by them.

In so far as theories of mathematics speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality.

Albert Einstein

As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences - I call it Dialectic - which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.

Albert Einstein

The idea of mathematics is the idea of science in general.

I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.

Albert Einstein

I should consider that I know nothing about physics if I were able to explain only how things might be, and were unable to demonstrate that they could not be otherwise. For, having reduced physics to mathematics, the demonstration is now possible, and I think that I can do it within the small compass of my knowledge.

René Descartes

I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist - all that is commonly called Science - to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made.

Bertrand Russell

The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

G. K. Chesterton

Most other Sciences [but not mathematics] are in a state of constant flux - the precious truths of one generation being smiled at as paradoxes by the second generation, and contemptuously swept away as childish nonsense by the third.

Thus it would seem that wherever we infer from perceptions, it is only structure that we can validly infer; and structure is what can be expressed by mathematical logic, which includes mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.

Bertrand Russell

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

Ernest Hemingway

When algebra has been learnt, all goes smoothly until we reach those studies in which the notion of infinity is employed - the infinitesimal calculus and the whole of higher mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics originally signifies any kind of discipline or learning, but now it is taken for that science which teaches or contemplates whatever is capable of being numbered or measured.

Benjamin Franklin

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform.

Bertrand Russell

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

But my understanding is there are many villages you go to where there's really no schools, as a practical matter, and many of the schools still teach just how to memorize certain things rather than how to think critically about problems. And every country at this point, if it wants to succeed, needs to put in place free, compulsory education for its young people — because they just can't succeed unless they have some basic skills. They have to be able to read. They have to be able to do mathematics. They have to have some familiarity with computers. They have to be able to understand basic principles of science. If you don't have those basic tools, then it's very hard to find a decent job in today's economy.

I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics...

René Descartes