Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Bertrand Russell

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams

God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

Paul Dirac

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
H. L. Mencken

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
Nikola Tesla

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Bertrand Russell

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Galileo Galilei

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Bertrand Russell

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.
Stephen Hawking

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Francis Bacon

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
Charles Caleb Colton

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
Carl Sandburg

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.
Danica McKellar

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Montessori

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Stendhal

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the

application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Richard M. Nixon

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.
Danica McKellar

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.
Maimonides

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
Roger Bacon

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is. ~John Louis von Neumann

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time. ~Carl Sandburg

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ~Albert Einstein

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose. ~Albert Einstein

Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero. ~Author Unknown

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs. ~Isaac Barrow

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally. ~Calvin Trillin

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure. ~Stanislaw J. Lec, More Unkempt Thoughts

If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them. ~Phil Pastoret

[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle. ~Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary

"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;" I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre. ~Charles Babbage, letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about a couplet in his "The Vision of Sin"

Math is radical! ~Bumper Sticker

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics. ~Gregory Benford, Timescape

It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class. ~Author Unknown

If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. ~Author Unknown

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head. ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer. ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi. ~Richard Preston

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 Development of Mathematics

So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. ~Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. ~S. Gudder

The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra. ~Author Unknown

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede. ~Edward Gibbon,Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

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

It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants. ~Samuil Shchatunovski

Trigonometry is a sine of the times. ~Author Unknown

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

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~Paul Erdos

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human

spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings. ~Alfred North Whitehead

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events. ~Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms. ~Carl Boyer, 1949, calculus textbook

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry. ~Eric Bell, The Search for Truth

Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is. ~Author Unknown

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics. ~William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic. ~Bertrand Russell

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. ~Gottfried Leibniz

How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards? You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time. ~Author Unknown

To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas. ~Ivars Peterson

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius. ~Harold Marston Morse

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics. ~Gregory Bateson

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. ~Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

You may be an engineer if your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place. ~Author Unknown

The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't

even begin to think about in any very definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions. ~Ronald L. Graham

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. ~Mark Twain

Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that? ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal. ~Tobias Dantzig

Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers. ~Nicholas Eberstadt, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule

The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination. ~Thomas Hill

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as

much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed.... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. ~From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972

I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.... ~Stendhal (Henri Beyle), The Life of Henri Brulard

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. ~Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically. ~Albert Einstein

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician. ~Paul Dirac

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

[T]he different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. ~Lewis Carroll

[G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous. ~Henri Poincar

Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling. ~Author Unknown

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. ~Bertrand Russell

God is real, unless declared integer. ~Author Unknown

If a healthy minded person takes an interest in science, he gets busy with his mathematics and haunts the laboratory. ~W.S. Franklin

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. ~Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

There was a young man from Trinity, Who solved the square root of infinity. While counting the digits, He was seized by the fidgets, Dropped science, and took up divinity. ~Author Unknown

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers... ~Heinrich Hertz

In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers. ~Author Unknown

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't. ~Author Unknown

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. ~Euclid

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure. ~Hermann Hankel

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. ~Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

I know that two and two make four - & should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure. ~George Gordon, Lord Byron

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting. ~Ernst Mach

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding. ~Percy William Bridgman, The Way Things Are

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That's subtraction. ~Mae West

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about

breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.... ~Paul Auster, The Music of Chance

Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful? ~Pliny the Elder, Natural History

Uneven numbers are the gods' delight. ~Virgil, The Eclogues

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

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, Dots and Lines

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return. ~Bertrand Russell, 1912

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

Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so. ~Robertson Davies, "Of the Conservation of Youth," The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

A million thanks to Norm & Andy for submitting some of these quotes!

Archimedes of Syracus (287-212 B. C. E)

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. Eureka, euraka! Don't spoil my circles! (or Do not disturb my circles!) There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.

Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E)

Now what is characteristic of any nature is that which is best for it and gives most joy. Such a man is the life according to reason, since it is that which makes him man. There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel. The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things. To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it. If this is a straight line [showing his audience a straight line drawn by a ruler], then it necessarily ensues that the sum of the angles of the triangle is equal to two right angles, and conversely, if the sum is not equal to two right angles, then neither is the triangle rectilinear. It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world. But Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end. We cannot ... prove geometrical truths by arithmetic. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree. The continuum is that which is divisible into indivisibles that are infinitely divisible. Physics.

Roger Bacon (1214-1294)

In mathematics I can report no deficience, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics. Mathematics is the door and key to the sciences. Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of the world.

There are four great sciences ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics, which the saints discovered at the beginning of the world. ... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

Heri Bergson (1859-1941)

One can always reason with reason.

Janos Bolyai (1802-1860)

I have created a new universe from nothing. One must do not violence to nature, nor model it in conformity to any blindly formed chimaera.

Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848)

My special pleasure in mathematics rested particularly on its purely speculative part. Even in the realm of things which do not claim actuality, and do not even claim possibility, there exist beyond dispute sets which are infinite.

George Boole (1815-1869)

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be occupied with the ideas of number and quantity. 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.

Geoge Cantor (1845-1918)

The essence of mathematics is its freedom. I see it, but I don't believe it. Mathematics is entirely free in its development, and its concepts are only linked by the necessity of being consistent, and are co-ordinated with concepts introduced previously by means of precise definitions. In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it. every transfinite consistent multiplicity, that is, every transfinite set, must have a definite aleph as its cardinal number.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

I think, therefore I am. Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare. With me everything turns into mathematics. It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. ... the two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on wh ich alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge. In order to seek truth it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt as far as possible all things. Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe. There have been only Mathematicians who were able to find some proofs, that is to say some sure and certain reasons. Take what you need; act as you must, and you will obtain that for which you wish! Only having one truth about each object, whoever finds it knows as much as can known about it.

Democritus (460-370 B. C)

Found, but not proven. No one has ever surpassed me in constructing figures by means of proofs, not even the Egyptian ``harpedouaptes''(knotters of ropes or geometry), as they are called. I would rather discover one scientific fact than become King of Persia. Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality. I don't believe in mathematics. God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically. Nature to him (Newton) was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort. Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore. Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.

Euclid of Alexandria (325-265 B.C.E)

There is no royal road to geometry. A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, "What do I get by learning these things?" So Euclid called a slave and said "Give him threepence, since he must make a gain out of what he learns."

Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 B. C. E)

Willingly would I burn to death like Phaeton, were this the price for reaching the sun and learning its shape, its size and its substance.

Euripides (485-406 B. C. E)

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it. And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)

Arithmetic has began to totter. Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician. What are numbers? What is the nature of arithmetical truth?

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)-German

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws My Services are bound. I am ever more convinced that the necessity of our geometry cannot be proved - at least not by human reason for human reason. One sees by that, what should be understood by a class composed from two or more class.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. God does arithmetic. I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Kurt Godel (1906-1978)

Nothing new had been done in Logic since Aristotle! Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine. I don't believe in natural science. The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules. ...a consistency proof for [any] system ... can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system ... itself.

Paul Albert Gordan (1837-1912)

This (axiomatic math) is no longer mathematics, it is theology.

Hermann Gunter Grassmann (1809-1877)

Pure Mathematics is the science of the individual object in as much as it is born in thought. Pure Mathematics is the theory of forms.

Jacques Salomon Hadamard (1865-1963)

Can the existence of a mathematical entity be proved without definiing it ? The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.

Practical application is found by not looking for it, and one can say that the whole progress of civilization rests on that principle. To parents who despair because their children are unable to master the first problems in arithmetic I can dedicate my examples. For, in arithmetic, until the seventh grade I was last or nearly last. Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition.

Hermann Hankel (1839-1873)

purely intellectual, a pure theory of forms, which has as its purpose, not the combination of quantities, or of their images, the numbers, but objects of thought to which may correspond effectives or relations, even though such a correspondence is not necessary. In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built, and what one has established, another undoes. In Mathematics alone each generation adds a new storey to the old structure.

Charles Hermite (1822-1901)

Turn away with fear and horror from this lamentable plague of continuous functions that do not have a derivative. I believe that numbers and functions of Analysis are not the arbitrary result of our minds; I think that they exist outside of us, with the same character of necessity as the things of objective reality, and we meet them or discover them, and stuty them, as do the physicists, the chemists and the zoologists. There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation. We are servants rather than masters in mathematics. Analysis takes back with one hand what it gives with the other. I recoil in fear and loathing from that deplorable evil: continuous functions with no derivatives.

David Hilbert (1862-1943)

We must know, we will know. Let us consider three distinct systems of things. (refer to Chair, table, beer-mug as point, line and plane for axioms) Mathematics is a game played according to certain rules with meaningless marks on paper.

No one will expel us from this paradise Cantor has created for us. The finest product (Cantor's work on set theory) of mathematical genius and one of the supreme achievments of purly intellectual human activity. I have tried to avoid long numerical computations, thereby following Riemann's postulate that proofs should be given through ideas and not voluminous computations. The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality. Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country. The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man. The faculty is not a pool changing room. [On the proposed appointment of the first woman professor.] If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

Carl Gustav Jacobi (1804-1851)

It is a pity that you (Gauss) did not publish this result, since you have published so many poorer papers. It will not be possible to elucidate it (refers to Grammer rule for degenerate coefficent matrix) briefly. God ever arithmetizes. One should always generalize. The real end of science is the honour of the human mind. Mathematics is the science of what is clear by itself. The God that reigns in Olympus is Number Eternal.

Lord William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907)

When you can measure what you are talking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

However, before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else. Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God. Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

...I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice.; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him. I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body's shadow lies here.

Leopold Kronecker (1823-1891)

God created the natural number, and all the rest is the work of man Of what use is your (Lindemann's proof of transcendental of pi) beautiful investigation regarding pi ? Why study such problems when irrational numbers do not exist ? Number theorists are like lotus-eaters - having tasted this food they can never give it up.

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

I must meditate further on this (this refers to Parallel Postulate) I regard as quite useless the reading of large treatises of pure analysis: too large a number of methods pass at once before the eyes. It is in the works of applications that one must study them; one judges their ability there and one apprises the manner of making use of them. As long as algebra and geometry have been separated, their progress have been slow and their uses limited; but when these two sciences have been united, they have lent each mutual forces, and have marched together towards perfection.

Johann Lambert (1728-1777)

This hypothesis (Parallel hypothesis) would not destroy itself at all easily. I should almost therefore put forward the proposal that the third hypothsis (angle sum of a triangle less than two right angles) holds on the surface of an imaginary sphere. Proofs of the Euclidean [parallel] postulate can be developed to such an extent that apparently a mere trifle remains. But a careful analysis shows that in this seeming trifle lies the crux of the matter; usually it contains either the proposition that is being proved or a postulate equivalent to it.

I am undecided wheter or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

The invention of logarithms, by shortening the labors, double the life of the astronomer. All the effects of nature are only mathematical results of a small number of immutable laws. What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense. Read Euler: he is our master in everything. It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematicall speculations.

Andrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833)

These ... tables (values of trignometry functions), constructed by means of new techniques based principally on the calculus of differences, are one of the most beautiful monuments ever erected to science. It is a matter for considerable regret that Fermat, who cultivated the theory of numbers with so much success, did not leave us with the proofs of the theorems he discovered. In truth, Messrs Euler and Lagrange, who have not distained this kind of research, have proved most of these theorems, and have even substituted extensive theories for the isolated propositions of Fermat. But there are several proofs which have resisted their efforts.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour. (refers to Charles Louis De Secondat Montesquieu and to the Dutches of Orleans) Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves. The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times. The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road. The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful resource of the human spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being. Miracles are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

John Von Neumann (1903-1957)

We must regard classical mathematics as a combinatorial game played with symbols.

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. It is the glory of geometry that from so few principles, fetched from without, it is able to accomplish so much. ...from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World. (Principia Mathematica) I feign no hypotheses. The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn. The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics. God created everything by number, weight and measure. I will not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all. Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)(3rd children of Etienne Pascal (1588-1640))

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death. Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless. I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess. Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. It is not certain that everything is uncertain. Always substitute mentally the definitions in place of the defined. One must have altogether a wrong spirit to reason badly about principles so great that it is almost impossible for them to escape. To speak freely of mathematics, I find it the highest exercise of the spirit; but at the same time I know that it is so useless that I make little distinction between a man who is only a mathematician and a common artisan. Also, I call it the most beautiful profession in the world; but it is only a profession; Humble thyself, impotent reason. The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it. The more I see of men, the better I like my dog. I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.

Plato (429-347 B. C. E), Plato's Academy

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Whatever we Greeks receive we improve and perfect. Geometry will draw the soul t oward truth and create the spirit of philosophy. No nature except an extraordinary one could ever easily formulate a theory. He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god. The ludicrous state of solid geometry made me pass over this branch. He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side. Mathematics is like draughts [checkers] in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state. The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. ... arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

How can intuition deceive us at this point ? Facts do not speak. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. It (logic) is no longer sterile, it begets contradictions. Later mathematicians will regard set theory as a disease from which one has recovered. Mathematicians are born, not made. I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry. Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. [As opposed to the quotation: Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing]. Science is built up with 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. A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects. Thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only. Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything. Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and subconscious. Zero is the number of objects that satisfy a condition that is never satisfied. But as never means "in no case", I do not see that any progress has been made.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

Circles to square and cubes to double would give a man exercise trouble.

Diadochus Proclus (410-485)

Wherever there is number, there is beauty. According to most accounts, geometry was first discovered among the Egyptians, taking its origin from the measurement of areas. For they found it necessary by reason of the flooding of the Nile, which wiped out everybody's proper boundaries. Nor is there anything surprising in that the discovery both of this and of the other sciences should have had its origin in a practical need, since everything which is in process of becoming progresses from the imperfect to the perfect. The Pythagoreans considered all mathematical science to be divided into four parts: one half they marked off as concerned with quantity, the other half with magnitude; and each of these they posited as twofold. A quantity can be considered in regard to its character by itself or in relation to another quantity, magnitudes as either stationary or in motion. Arithmetic, then, studies quantity as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics magnitude inherently moving. This, therefore, is Mathematics: She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; she brings to light our intrinsic ideas; she abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth ...

Pythagoras (572-497 B.C. E) and Pythagorean

All was numbers. Number was the substance of all things. Number rules the universe. Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons. Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent. There is geometry in the humming of the strings.

Bernard Riemann (1826-1866)

If only I had the theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough. Therefore, either the reality on which our space is based must form a discrete manifold or else the reason for the metric relationships must be sought for, externally, in the binding forces acting on it. What remains to be resovled is the question of knowing to what extent and up to what point these hypotheses are found to be confirmed by experience. It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in

advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it.

Joseph Alfred Serret (1819-1885)

Algebra is, properly speaking, the Analysis of equations.

Socrates (469-399 B. C. E)

The understanding of mathematics is necessary for a sound grasp of ethics.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. Seek simplicity, and distrust it. Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. We think in generalities, but we live in details. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth. Let us grant that the pusuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit. Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system. No Roman ever lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram. Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been create for rendering clear the quantitative aspect of the world. The science of pure mathematics may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (1885-1955)

I would like to throttle the man who wrote this book. God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the devil exists since its consistency cannot be proved. If the game of mathematics is actually consist, then the formula of consistency cannot be proved within this game. In our time, the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra are fighting for every mathematical domain. Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong. Symmetry, as wide or narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.

Xenophanes (570-475 B. C. E)

The gods did not reveal all things to men at the start; but as time goes on, by searching, they discover more and more.

Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953)

No mathematical error can be demonstrated in my [earlier] proof. ...self-evidence ... must not be confused with ... provability.

"You do not study mathematics because it helps you build a bridge. You study mathematics because it is the poetry of the universe. Its beauty transcends mere things." --Johnathan David Farley; Orono, Me. "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." Albert Einstein "Numbers rule the universe." Pythagoras c.550 B.C. "The people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge." Hosea 4:6

"A teacher's day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony and one-eighth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic." Susan Ohanian "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe." Galileo

"The different branches of mathematics: ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision." Lewis Carroll "Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience. " Mathematics: The Science of Patterns by Keith Devlin. "Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty. " Bertrand Russell "Wherever there is number, there is beauty." -Proclus (410-485 A.D.) "In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and highest responsibility anyone could have." ~ Lee Iacocca ~ "I think there's no way they should have to teach [math] now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3x = 2y/4." ~Rosie O'Donnell~ "What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learned as a task but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement." ~Bertrand Russell~ "Do what you love, love what you do, and deliver more than you promise." ~Harvey McKay~ "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." ~Albert Einstein

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophesies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine men in the bonds of Hell." ~St. Augustine
actually a mistranslation (who knew?) : more info here

"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation...which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry." ~Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1917 "Geometry enlightens the mind and sets one's mind straight...The mind that turns regularly to geometry is unlikely to fall into error." ~The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, 14th Century Islamic historical work "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty." ~Bertrand Russell

"Mathematics is the queen of science."

~Carl Friedrich Gauss

"...it is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures..." ~Galileo, speaking of understanding the universe "Wherever there is a number, there is beauty." "Mathematics is the gate and key to science." ~Proclus ~Roger Bacon

"The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit." ~Alfred North Whitehead "When we cannot use the compass of mathematics or the torch of experience...it is certain we cannot take a single step forward." ~Voltaire

"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics"--Simon Poisson
1. As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained. Arthur Cayley 2. 3. It isnt that they cannot see the solution. It is that they cannot see the problem.GK Chesterton The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.C.W. Churchmann The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. Havelock Ellis The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.Blaise Pascal The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life. Ernest Renan An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible quantities: a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity.--Howard W. Even Technical skill is mastery of complexity. Creativity is mastery of simplicity.E.C. Zeeman Mathematical knowledge adds vigour to the mind, frees it from prejudice, credulity, and superstition. John Arbuthnot

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. John Adams 11. A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.Howard W. Eves

12. The study of mathematics cannot be replaced by any other activity that will train and develop man's purely logical faculties to the same level of rationality.C.O Oakley 13. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you'll have to run much faster.Lewis Carroll 14. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete selfconsciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds. John William Navin Sullivan (1886-1937) 15. I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) 16. How could youths better learn to live than by once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would educate their minds as much as mathematics. Henry David Thoreau 17. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.William James (1842 - 1910) 18. Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) 19. Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth. On the lever in Pappus Synagoge 20. Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.Newton 21. Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will. Blaise Pascal 22. It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. Rene Descartes 23. Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. Rene Descartes 24. If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.John Louis von Neumann 25. Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.Albert Einstein 26. So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.Francis Bacon, "Of Studies" 27. Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. Dean Schlicter 28. 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 29. Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.Alfred North Whitehead 30. Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal. Tobias Dantzig

31. It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think. John Wesley Young 32. Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature. John Allen Paulos 33. The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination. Augustus de Morgan 34. Questions are creative acts of intelligence. Frank Kingdon 35. Two and two the mathematician continues to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.James McNeill Whistler 36. The work of a teacher -- exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same -- is at its heart, an intellectual and ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations...William Ayres 37. To learn, you must want to be taught.Proverbs 12:1 38. Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently. Henry Ford 39. You live your life between your ears.Bebe Moore Campbell 40. The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. Alfred North Whitehead 41. If there's no struggle, there's no progress.Frederick Douglass 42. The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.-- Paul Halmos 43. The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers!R. W. Hamming 44. Do not falter or shrink. Just think out your work, and work out your think. Nixon Waterman 45. There is a difference between not knowing and not knowing yet.Shelia Tobias 46. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.Bernard Baruch 47. Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. Albert Einstein

Mathematics Quotes and Quotation

GENERAL "A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there." --Charles Darwin

"A topologist is one who doesn't know the difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup." --John Kelley "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein "As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school." --Cokie Roberts "Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater." --Albert Einstein "From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." --Sir James Jeans "God does arithmetic." --Karl Friedrich Gauss "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." --Albert Einstein "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts." -- for support rather than illumination." -Andrew Lang "He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god." --Plato "How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?" --Bertrand Russell "I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing." -Aldous Huxley "I don't believe in mathematics." --Albert Einstein "I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning." --Plato "I have no faith in political arithmetic." --Adam Smith "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." --Ernest Rutherford "Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics." --Simeon Poisson "Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning." --John Locke "Mathematics consists of proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way." --George Polye "Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper." --David Hilbert "[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence." --William Wordsworth "Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state." --Plato "Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the navet of the mathematician himself." -Abraham Kaplan "Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things." --Jules Henri Poincare "Mathematics is the only instructional material that can be presented in an entirely undogmatic way." --Max Dehn "Mathematics is the science of what is clear by itself." --Carl Jacobi "Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense." --Charles Darwin "Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform." --Bertrand Russell "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so." --Galileo Galilei "Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful." -Martin Luther "No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically." -Leonardo da Vinci

"Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?" --Helen Keller "Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare." --Rene Descartes "Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone." --Henry John Stephen Smith "Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated." --M. C. Reed "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore." --Albert Einstein "Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance." --Morris Kline "The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality." --David Hilbert "The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being." --Gottfried Whilhem Liebniz "The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man." --David Hilbert "The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal." --Plato "The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought." --Havelock Ellis "The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience." --Emmanuel Kant "The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life." --Ernest Renan "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Benajamin Disraeli "There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world." --Nikolai Lobatchevsky "You know we all became mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy." --Max Rosenlicht "I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate." --David Mumford

Maths quotes what famous people saying about mathematics

MATHEMATICS IS A GREAT MOTIVATOR FOR ALL HUMANS .. B ECAUSE STARTS WITH "ZERO" BUT IT NEVER END (INFINITY)..
1127 173 Vignesh R

ITS CAREER

IF

PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE THAT MATHEMATICS IS SIMPLE , IT IS ONLY BECAUSE T HEY DO NOT REALIZE HOW C OMPLICATED LIFE IS .
552 112 Tobias Dantzig

MATHEMATICS IS LIKE TRUE LOVE- A SIMPLE IDEA BUT CAN GET COMPLICATED...
516 131 Ricky Gakhar

IF

THERE IS A
511

G OD ,

HE ' S A GREAT MATHEMATIC IAN .

Paul Dirac

185

S MALL

MINDS DISCUSS PERSONS . A VERAGE MINDS DISCUSS EVENTS . DISCUSS IDEAS . R EALLY GREAT MINDS DI SCUSS MATHEMATICS .
387 73 Anon

G REAT

MINDS

O LD

MATH TEACHERS NEV ER DIE , THEY JUST TEND TO IN FINITY .

332 92 Unknown

"I F

YOU ABLE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEMS IN MATHS, THEN YOU ALSO ABLE T O SOLVE THE PROBLEMS IN YOUR LIFE" (M ATHS IS A GREAT C HALLENGER )
278 55 Vignesh

GO

DOWN DEEP ENOUGH I NTO ANYTHING AND YOU WILL FIND MATHEMATIC S .
247 66 Dean Schlicter

''T HE

MOST INCOMPREHENSIBLE ABOUT COMPREHENSIBLE ''.

283 102 Kiran B. Mali

M ATHEMATICS

IS THAT I T IS

M ATHS ---> K ING

239

OF
78

A RTS ; Q UEEN
AJ

OF

S CIENCE

L IFE

IS GOOD FOR ONLY TWO THINGS , DISCOVERING MATHEMATICS AND TEACHING MATHEMATICS .
157 46 Simeon Poisson

M ATHEMATICS
157

IS THE ART OF GIVING THE SAME NAME TO DIFFERENT THINGS .

50 Henri Poincare

T HE

THINGS OF THIS WO RLD CANNOT BE MADE K NOWN WITHOUT A KNOWLEDGE OF MATHEMATICS .

126 35 Roger Bacon

MATHEMATICIAN IS A B LIND MAN IN A DARK ROOM LOOKING FOR A BL ACK CAT WHICH ISN ' T THERE
180 92 Charles R. Darwin

P URE

MATHEMATICS IS T HE WORLD ' S BEST GAME . I T IS MORE ABSORBING THAN CHESS , MORE OF A GAMBLE THA N POKER , AND LASTS LONGER THAN M ONOPOLY . I T ' S FREE . I T CAN BE PLAYED ANYWHERE - A RCHIMEDES DID IT IN A BATHTUB .
112 29 Richard J. Trudeau, Dots and Lines

T HE

MORE YOU KNOW , THE LESS SURE YOU ARE

118

39

Voltaire

MATHEMATICS "PROBLEMS"!!
107

HAVE
40

S TRONG H EART ! S O

ONLY , IT WILL FACE SO MANY

Vignesh R (India)

IF

TWO WRONGS DON ' T MAKE A RIGHT , TRY THREE .

122 56 Unknown

T HERE

IS SOMETHING I DON ' T UNDERSTAND ABOUT ALGEBRA : I T HAS BEEN AROUND FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS , YET NO ONE HAS EVER FOUND OUT WHAT THE V ALUE OF " X " OR " Y " REALLY IS .
117 51 Richard van der Merwe

"T HE

STUDY OF MATHEMATICS , LIKE THE MAGNIFICENCE "

82 20 Charles caleb cotton

N ILE ,

BEGINS IN MINUTENESS BUT ENDS IN

"O BVIOUS "

IS THE MOST DANGEROU S WORD IN MATHEMATIC S .

50 Eric Temple Bell

111

I NFINITY

IS A FLOORLE SS ROOM WITHOUT WALL S OR CEILING .

90 30 Unknown

M ATHEMATICS
102

IS A GAME PLAYED ACCORDING TO CERTAIN SIMPLE RULES WITH MEANINGLESS MARKS ON PAPER .
45 David Hilbert

M ATHS

IS YOUR FRIEND I F YOU MEET WITH HIM EVERY DAY , HE BECOMES YOUR BEST FRIEND . I F YOU LEAVE FOR A TI ME HE FORGET YOU AND YOU FORGET HIM .
66 12 Muhammad Ahmed

DO

NOT WORRY ABOUT YO UR DIFFICULTIES IN MATHEMATICS , MINE ARE GREATER .

88 35 Albert Einstein

ASSURE YOU THAT

IN

MATHEMATICS YOU DO N ' T UNDERSTAND THINGS .

79 27 Johann von Neumann

Y OU

JUST GET USED TO THEM .

A RITHMETIC

IS WHERE N UMBERS FLY LIKE PIGE ONS IN AND OUT OF YOUR HEAD .

Carl Sandburg

B LACK

HOLES RESULT FROM

Unknown

G OD

DIVIDING THE UNIV ERSE BY ZERO .

M ATHEMATICS T HE G OD T HE

IS THE SU PREME JUDGE ; FROM ITS DECISIONS T HERE IS NO APPEAL .

Tobias Dantzig

PULSE OF THE EART H IS MATHEMATICS

Hithesh

DOES NOT CARE ABO UT OUR MATHEMATICAL DIFFICULTIES ; EMPIRICALLY . Albert Einstein ESSENCE OF MATHEM ATICS RESIDES IN ITS FREEDOM .
Georg Cantor

HE

INTEGRATES

M ATHEMATICS

IS MADE O F PERCENT IMAGINATION .

Unknown

50

PERCENT FORMULAS ,

50

PERCENT PROOFS , AND

50

M EASURE WHAT IS MEASU RABLE , AND MAKE MEASURABLE WHAT IS NOT SO . Galileo Galilei I F YOU THINK DOGS CAN ' T COUNT , TRY PUTTING THREE DO G BISCUITS IN POCKET AND THEN GIVI NG TOMMY ONLY TWO OF THEM .
77 40 Phil Pastoret

YOUR

S OMETIMES
76

IT IS USEFU L TO KNOW HOW LARGE YOUR ZERO IS .

40 Unknown

IF I

FEEL UNHAPPY , I DO MATHEMATICS TO BE COME HAPPY . I F MATHEMATICS TO KEEP HAPPY .

71 35 Alfred Renyi

AM HAPPY ,

DO

EVERY IDIOT CALLS A MATHEMATICIAN A IDIOT BECAUSE THEY CAN'T MEASURE THEIR INTELLIGENCE.
47 13 Jayanth Eric

T HE

ONLY WORLD IN THI S UNIVERSE IS

95 63 Kiran B. Mali

'MATHEMATICS'.

W ELL

DONE IS BETTER T HAN WELL SAID .

61 31 Ben Franklin

M ATHEMATICAL
49

PROOFS , LIKE DIAMONDS , ARE HARD AND CLEAR , AND WILL BE TOUCHED WITH NOTHING BUT STRICT REASONING .
20 John Locke

T HE PERSON WHO CAN SO LVE MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS , CAN LEAD LIFE EASILY ,M ATHS TELLU THAT EVERY PROBLEM AS SOLUTION ... WE CAN FIND NUMBER O F SOLUTIONS FOR ONE PROBLEM ...A PLLY IT IN THE LIFE ALSO WE CAN LEAD OUR LIFE HAPPILY ...
53 26 swetha

T HE

HIGHEST FORM OF PURE THOUGHT IS IN MA THEMATICS

50 23 Plato

M ATHEMATICS
38

IS THE BR AIN ' S SHARPENER .

11 Angeliza Ampeloquio, PH

AN

EXPERT IS A MAN WHO HAS MADE ALL THE MISTAKES , WHICH CAN BE MADE , IN A VERY NARROW FIELD .
38 13 Niels Bohr

MATHS AND LIFE IS SA ME , BECAUSE BOTH CONTAIN S LOTS OF PROBLEMS

32 8 saranya rajan

M ATHS

IS LIKE A FUN & GAME ...! THE MORE YOU PLAY , THE MORE YOU ENJOY ...,, ALSO GET KNOWLEDGE ....!!
32 9 Avika mishra

M ATHEMATICS IS THE HANDWRITING S PIRIT OF L IFE ITSELF .

43 20 Claude Bragdon

ON THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE VERY

M ATHEMATICS
34

IS LIKE A RAIN ... CONTINOUOSLY DO IT .

12 Syawal

W HEN

WE KNOW HOW TO S OLVE IT ,

WE

WILL

IT

IS EASIER TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE THAN TO GET ROUND A MATHEMAT ICIAN .

50 28 Augustus de Morgan