Mathematicians' quotes

Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries: for mathematics, the cultural world is one country. - David Hilbert

A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.  - A.S. Besicovich, A Mathematicians miscellany, 1953

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood. - Paul Lockhart

Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity-- to pose their own problems, to make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs-- you deny them mathematics itself. - Paul Lockhart

Where there is matter, there is geometry. - Johannes Kepler

In mathematics, the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems. -

Georg Cantor

No mathematician should ever allow him forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ...Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later: ..(but) I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. - G. H. Hardy

Old mathematicians never die; they just lose some of their functions. -

Tim Nelson

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems - P. Erdos

Addendum: American coffee is good for lemmas

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t

there. - Charles R Darwin

Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decision there is no appeal.

- Tobias Dantzig

Mathematics is the sience which uses easy words for hard ideas.

- Edward Kasner

It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, 'Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof. - Ronald Graham

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.... - W. S. Anglin, Mathematics and History

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose... I usually chose the beautiful. - Hermann Weyl T

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei

Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry. - Oswald Veblen T

I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now. - J E Littlewood

If you open a mathematics paper at random, on the pair of pages before you, you will find a mistake. - Joseph Doob

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. - Dean Schlicter

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. - Howard Aiken

No mathematician can be a complete mathematician unless he is also something of a poet. - Karl Weierstrass

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra. - W. K. Clifford

Geometry is the science of correct reasoning on incorrect figures. - George Polya

There are certainly people who regard √2 as something perfectly obvious but jib at √-1. This is because they think they can visualise the former as something in physical space but not the latter. Actually √-1 is a much simpler concept . - Edward Titschma...

No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful. - George Boole

The best review of arithmetic consists in the study of algebra. - Florian Cajori

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular p r ivilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede. - Edward Gibbon

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong. - Raymond Smullyan

Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards. - William Whewell

Whoever ... proves his point and demonstrates the prime truth geometrically should be believed by all the world, for there we are captured. - Albrecht Durer

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Maxims and Reflexions, 1829)

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes. - Eric T. Bell

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. - The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

I have found a very great number of exceedingly beautiful theorems. - Pierre de Fermat

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - John von Neumann

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories. - Philip J. Davis

A mind which has a taste for scientific inquiry, and has learned the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations. - John Herschel

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis. - Augustin Fresnel

I have no certainties, at most probabilities. - Renato Caccioppoli

Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been. - Theodore Von Karman

When you can measure what you are talking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. - Lord William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907)

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization. - John Kemeny

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained. - Arthur Cayley

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. - B. Kernighan & D. Ritchie

Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. - Henri Poincare

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably. - Christiaan Huygens

One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity. - Willard Gibbs (1839 - 1903)

Pure mathematics is the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub. - Richard J. Trudeau

Mathematics is like childhood diseases. The younger you get it, the better. - Arnold Sommerfeld

Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less. - Stanislaw Ulam

Simplicibus itaque verbis gaudet Mathematica Veritas, cum etiam per se simplex sit Veritatis oratio. (So Mathematical Truth prefers simple words since the language of Truth is itself simple.) - Tycho Brahe

It can be of no practical use to know that π is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know. - Edward Titchmarsh

The White Bridge, across from my home in Elk Rapids, Mi. People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding. - Glenn T. Seaborg

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. The difficulty has its main source in the ambiguity of language. - Giuseppe Peano

Origami Soma Cubes (see Piet Hein, Deaths, 1996) *The New Origami by Steve and Megumi Biddle A Man of Knowledge like a rich Soil, feeds If not a world of Corn, a world of Weeds. - Benjamin Franklin

It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. - Albert Einstein

Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore, *Wik For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of the maximum or minimum does not appear. - Leonhard Euler

The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man. - Rachel Carson

A Few Good Men Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora. It is vain to do with more what can be done with les s. - William of Ockham

How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law? - Joseph Bertrand

God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by the wave theory, and the devil runs it by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. - Sir Lawrence Bragg

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding. - Glenn T. Seaborg

It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. - Albert Einstein

A Man of Knowledge like a rich Soil, feeds If not a world of Corn, a world of Weeds. - Benjamin Franklin

Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? - Edward Lorenz

For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of the maximum or minimum does not appear. - Leonhard Euler

The true business of the philosopher(scientist), though not flattering to his vanity, is merely to ascertain, arrange and condense the facts. - Sir John Leslie

A Few Good Men Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora. It is vain to do with more what can be done with les s. - William of Ockham

For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth. - Marshall Stone

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about `and'. - Arthur Eddington

God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by the wave theory, and the devil runs it by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. - Sir Lawrence Bragg

A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies. - Stefan Banach

The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps ... - Alexandre Grothendiech.

Modern science, as training the mind to an exact and impartial analysis of facts, is an education specially fitted to promote citizenship. - Karl Pearson

Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.
- Paul Erdos

Mathematics, however, is, as it were, its own explanation; this, although it may seem hard to accept, is nevertheless true, for the recognition that a fact is so is the cause upon which we base the proof. - Girolamo Cardano

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius. - Marston Morse

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently. - Wernher von Braun

We [he and Halmos] share a philosophy about linear algebra: we think basis-free, we write basis-free, but when the chips are down we close the office door and compute with matrices like fury. - Irving Kaplansky

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier—when it's spelled with a lower case letter. - Richard Hamming (creator of the hamming code, with a lower case h )

The mathematical education of the young physicist [Albert Einstein] was not very solid, which I am in a good position to evaluate since he obtained it from me in Zurich some time ago. - Hermann Minkowski

Mathworld Wolfram There is no reason why the history and philosophy of science should not be taught in such a way as to bring home to all pupils the grandeur of science and the scope of its discoveries. - Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. - Norbert Wiener

It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. - Albert Einstein

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Just a small collection from Internet