Russian Mathematician Quotes

Daniel Bernoulli

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Andrey Kolmogorov

Vladimir Arnold

Leonid Kantorovich

Leonid Hurwicz

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and by other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA.).

Vladimir Arnold

There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn't expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off.

In planning the idea of decentralization must be connected with routines of linking plans of rather autonomous parts of the whole system. Here one can use a conditional separation of the system by means of fixing values of flows and parameters transmitted from one part to another. One can use an idea of sequential recomputation of the parameters, which was successfully developed by many authors for the scheme of Dantzig-Wolfe and for aggregative linear models.

Leonid Kantorovich

An idea is nothing, its implementation everything.

Alexander Kronrod

I think that considerable progress can be made in the analysis of the operations of nature by the scholar who reduces rather complicated phenomena to their proximate causes and primitive forces, even though the causes of those causes have not yet been detected.

I do support direct action. I do not advocate or support violence.… Elections are not a viable means of ensuring democratic change in Russia. Therefore I do support using other methods to push for a change back towards democracy

Boris Berezovsky

The goal of a definition is to introduce a mathematical object. The goal of a theorem is to state some of its properties, or interrelations between various objects. The goal of a proof is to make such a statement convincing by presenting a reasoning subdivided into small steps each of which is justified as an "elementary" convincing argument.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

To have a good memory the first thing you have to do is to trust your memory.

Paul Sophus Epstein

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

Daniel Bernoulli

Mathematics, like a millstone, grinds everything placed under it and, just as you won't get wheat flour by grinding Deadly Nightshade, you won't get the truth from the false premises even if you cover the page with formulae...

With even a superficial knowledge of mathematics, it is easy to recognize certain characteristic features: its abstractions, its precision, its logical rigor, the indisputable character of its conclusions, and finally, the exceptionally broad range for its applications.

Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov

The theory of probability as mathematical discipline can and should be developed from axioms in exactly the same way as Geometry and Algebra.

Andrey Kolmogorov

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

Sofia Kovalevskaya