Math Quotes - Page 6

• The introduction of numbers as coordinates by reference to the particular division scheme of the open one-dimensional continuum is an act of violence whose only practical vindication is the special calculatory manageability of the ordinary number continuum with its four basic operations.

  Hermann Weyl

  Numbers, Violence, Introduction

  "Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science".

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• The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Mankind, Complexes, Objects

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• It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.

  Samuil Shatunovsky

  Jobs, Arithmetic, Operations

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• 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

  Christian, Education, Branches

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• It can be of no practical use to know that Pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

  Edward Charles Titchmarsh

  Education, Would Be, Use

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• 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 Temple Bell

  Race, Apes, Stranger

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• With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Philosophical, Mountain, Climbs

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• The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.

  Gosta Mittag-Leffler

  Dream, Art, Imagination

  "Mathematical Maxims and Minims". Book by Nicholas J. and John de Pillis Rose, 1988.

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• I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

  W. S. Gilbert

  Animal, Vegetables, Names

  'The Pirates of Penzance' (1879) act 1

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• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Perfection, Design

  "The Study of Mathematics" (1902)

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• The principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible.

  George Polya

  Knowledge, Principles, Culmination

  George Pólya (1948). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• 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.

  Georg Cantor

  Mean, Development, Definitions

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• Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Principles, Lovers, Grants

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• A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

  Paul Dirac

  Book, Physics, Ifs

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.457, Cambridge University Press

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• A mathematician who can only generalise is like a monkey who can only climb up a tree, and a mathematician who can only specialise is like a monkey who can only climb down a tree. In fact neither the up monkey nor the down monkey is a viable creature. A real monkey must find food and escape his enemies and so must be able to incessantly climb up and down. A real mathematician must be able to generalise and specialise.

  George Polya

  Real, Tree, Enemy

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• Wherever there is a number, there is beauty.

  Proclus

  Numbers

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• The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

  G. H. Hardy

  Beautiful, Patterns, Poet

  A Mathematician's Apology ch. 10 (1940)

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• The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

  Aristotle

  Beautiful, Education, Order

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• The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Disappointment, Molecules, Study

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.1, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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

  Albert Einstein

  Teaching, Science, Logical Ideas

  "Obituary for Emmy Noether". Letter to the Editor of The New York Times, www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. May 5, 1935.

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• The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying.

  Jean Dieudonne

  Teaching, Passion, Curiosity

  Underwood Dudley, Gerald L. Alexanderson, Nathan Altshiller-Court, John Aubry, Girolamo Cardano (2008). “Is mathematics inevitable?: a miscellany”, The Mathematical Association of America

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• Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Sex, Science, Physics

  "Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed". Book by Lawrence M. Krauss (p. 27), 1993.

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• A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Mediocrity, Paper, Dozen

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

  Albert Einstein

  Noses, Wells, Mathematics

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• Well done is better than well said.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Inspirational, Success, Motivational Sports

  Benjamin Franklin (2008). “The Way to Wealth and Poor Richard's Almanac”, Nayika Publishing

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