Mathematics Quotations

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

I was a good student with mathematical ability and interests. As such, I took the usual college preparatory program in high school for one looking to become an engineer: all the available courses in mathematics and science.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.

To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it.

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'

An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.

I changed the course of my life, from the rigidity of mathematics and the corporate rhythm to a more bohemian world.

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.

Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

I believe that great success is possible in any field — from music to mathematics to macro trading.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

I wasn't actually very naturally good at economics. My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly, and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to 'Non-Cooperative Games,' also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

My father's family hails from Banaras. My grandfather taught mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Banaras is also dedicated to Lord Shiva, home to one of the great jyotirlings, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

I was reasonably interested in mathematics in school. Typically what happens is... when you start playing chess, it takes up a lot of your attention. But about 10 years ago, I found that the Internet is very good to start learning about a lot of subjects.

I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

We are going to shut down their operations, and if he would do the math he would come back to the table,

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics.

In mathematics there are no true controversies.

I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded...

... nets, grids, and other types of calculus.

... preliminary accounting, banking and surveying (known as arithmetic, algebra and geometry).

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

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

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.

In mathematics our role is more that of servant than master.

The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

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

No one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor has created for us. Expressing the importance of Cantor's set theory in the development of mathematics.

I didn't work especially hard at mathematics at school, because I knew that's what I'd be doing later.

If you learn music, you'll learn history. If you learn music, you'll learn mathematics. If you learn music, you'll learn most all there is to learn.

I believe there are 15, 747, 724, 136, 275, 002, 577, 605, 653, 961, 181, 555, 468, 044, 717, 914, 527, 116, 709, 366, 231, 425, 076, 185, 631, 031, 296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.

Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.

It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.

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

From nothing I have created another entirely new world.

When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.