Quotes by Women Mathematicians

Ada Lovelace

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Shakuntala Devi

Hilda Phoebe Hudson

Rachel Riley

When you tell people that you are studying maths at uni, they are like, Oh …. Especially a blonde Essex girl.

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

First they said my [cyclol] structure [of proteins] couldn't exist. Then when it was found in Nature they said it couldn't be synthesized in a laboratory. Then when it was synthesized they said it wasn't important anyway.

Dorothy Maud Wrinch

I think that I have always had a basic liking for the natural numbers. To me they are the one real thing. We can conceive of a chemistry that is different from ours, or a biology, but we cannot conceive of a different mathematics of numbers. What is proved about numbers will be a fact in any universe.

To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.

Hilda Phoebe Hudson

I find that I may have emphasized the need to escape from the devils of mathematics to embark on the pleasures of the real world. But it works both ways, and sometimes the devils of the real world drive one into the pleasures of studying mathematics.

Cathleen Synge Morawetz

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

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Mathematics is a world created by the mind of man, and the mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!

In other words, without a theory, a plan, the mere mechanical manipulation of the numbers in a problem does not necessarily make sense just because you are using Arithmetic!

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber

Mathematics is obviously something that women should be able to do very well. It's very intuitive. You don't need a lot of machinery, and you don't need a lot of physical strength. You just need stamina, and women often have a great deal of stamina.

Mary Ellen Rudin

Knot theory for a long time was a little backwater of topology.

Immorality does not consist in being different. It consists in not allowing others to be so.

Shakuntala Devi

In dealing with academics, it is absolutely superb to be able to say you're a mathematician! Nobody dares to say mathematics is not important or not significant... No discipline surpasses mathematics in pure academic prestige.

Three shifts can be detected over time in the understanding of mathematics itself. One is a shift from completeness to incompleteness, another from certainty to conjecture, and a third from absolutism to relativity.