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Math Quotes

These page contains quotations on Mathematics by famous mathematicians.

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

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
Math is radical! ~Bumper Sticker

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

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

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

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 Poincaré

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

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

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

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





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 (Kline is quoting Alfred North Whitehead - "refuge from...")

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

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

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