Mathematical Quotes - Page 12

• No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Real, Math, Computer

  21 Copy quote

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

  Aristotle

  Math, Statistics, Knows

  13 Copy quote

• I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said..."

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Friendship, Math, Wish

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

  Albert Einstein

  Nature, Compassion, Animal

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.339, Princeton University Press

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.

  Isaac Newton

  Sea, Mind, Vigor

  11 Copy quote

• The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Stars, Disappointment, Father

  "An Introduction to Mathematics" by Alfred North Whitehead, Ch. 1, 1911.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

  Benjamin Peirce

  Math, Science, Definitions

  "Linear Associative Algebra" (1870)

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Jobs, Writing, Math

  9 Copy quote

• Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.

  Joseph Fourier

  Math, Science, Secret

  65 Copy quote

• One can't believe impossible things.

  Lewis Carroll

  Believe, Math, Impossible Things

  1871 Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 5,'Wool and Water'.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Plato

  Plato, Math, Men

  60 Copy quote

• Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

  Sofia Kovalevskaya

  Science, Opportunity, Reality

  19 Copy quote

• Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

  Maria Goeppert-Mayer

  Nature, Math, Men

  "A Course in Mathematical Methods for Physicists". Book by Russell L. Herman, p. 53, December 4, 2013.

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not certain that everything is uncertain.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Intelligence, Uncertain

  Blaise Pascal (1850). “The Thoughts on religion, and evidences of Christianity, of Pascal; tr., with intr., notes, etc., by G. Pearce”, p.99

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads; ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant general the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

  Martin Gardner

  Queens, Kings, Teaching

  "Adventures Of a Mathematician" by Martin Gardner, www.nytimes.com. May 9, 1976.

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Wisdom, Math, Eternity

  14 Copy quote

• The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man.

  David Hilbert

  Math, Men, Spirit

  "Über das Unendliche" ["On the Infinite"] (1925) address to der Westfälischen Mathematischen Gesellschaft in honour to the memory of Karl Weierstrass, as quoted in "Number The Language of Science" by Tobias Dantzig, 1930.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.

  Hugo Rossi

  Time, Fall, Math

  15 Copy quote

• We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.

  Arthur Eddington

  Learning, Math, Thinking

  "A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations" by Alan L. Mackay, (p. 79), 1991.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.

  Edward Kasner

  Math, Ideas, Use

  Edward Kasner, James Newman (2013). “Mathematics and the Imagination”, p.4, Courier Corporation

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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].

  Henri Poincare

  Art, Math, Names

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Education, Appreciation, Mean

  "Return to Mathematical Circles". Book by Howard Eves, 1988.

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.

  William Wordsworth

  Independent, Math, World

  20 Copy quote

• Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

  Charles Darwin

  Math, Seems, Mathematics

  11 Copy quote

• Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone.

  Henry John Stephen Smith

  Math, Use, May

  Quoted in Alexander Macfarlane, Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (1916). "Pure mathematics; may it never be of use to any man!" is cited as the toast of the Mathematical Society of England in Science, 10 Dec. 1886.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source