Mathematical Quotations

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.

I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but I don't have a mathematical brain.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.

We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.

There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.

The orthodox believers in God are divided into two camps, one of which maintains that the existence of God is as demonstrable as any mathematical proposition, while the other asserts that his existence is not demonstrable to the intellect.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn’t some magical thing that just started happening.

A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. 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. []

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded...

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

We do not master a scientific theory until we have shelled and completely prised free its mathematical kernel.

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

If you had done something twice, you are likely to do it again.

Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.

Ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity... is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

I never use a computer.

Has the mathematical abilities of a Clydesdale.

Democracy is not a mathematical deduction proved once and for all time. Democracy is a just faith fervently held, commitment to be tested again and again in the fiery furnace of history.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur Mathematics is written for mathematicians De Revolutionibus

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker.

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

Before you generalize, formalize, and axiomatize there must be mathematical substance.

How is error possible in mathematics?

[Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] ... Fourier's great mathematical poem ...

Fourier is a mathematical poem.

It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

But if two and two and fifty make a million,...

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.

Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind.

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.

The explorer is the person who is lost.

I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.

To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. G. is (x + 1)- ecrable.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

I am ill at these numbers.

I cannot do it without comp[u]ters.

Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. God is subtle, but he is not malicious.

I became more and more convinced that even nature could be understood as a relatively simple mathematical structure.

A mathematical equation stands forever

Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external.

Nature is written in mathematical language.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Inequality is the cause of all local movements.

The control of large numbers is possible, and like unto that of small numbers, if we subdivide them.

There is no perfect mathematical formula for pricing a business.