Mathematical Quotes - Page 18

• He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.

  Niels Henrik Abel

  Math, Track, Tails

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• The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Math, Mind

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Essays in Science”, p.24, Open Road Media

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• A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

  Howard Whitley Eves

  Math, Feelings, Intelligence

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• Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

  Ronald Fisher

  Math, Degrees, Statistics

  "Evolution in Action". Book by Julian S. Huxley, 1953.

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• Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important. . . The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?

  Helen Keller

  Life, Knowledge, Math

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.146, Om Books International

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• It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Truth, Interesting, Important

  Adventures of Ideas pt. 4, ch. 16 (1933)

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• It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

  Daniel Bernoulli

  Math, Science, Would Be

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• Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics.

  Edward Kasner

  Math, Paradox, Mathematics

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• Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.

  Abraham Kaplan

  Vets, Coping, Mathematics

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• The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.

  C. West Churchman

  Math, Intellectual, Answers

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• Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Perfect, Damage

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• Mathematics is the only instructional material that can be presented in an entirely undogmatic way.

  Max Dehn

  Math, Way, Materials

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• One good thing about teaching calculus is that you develop a hardened attitude towards repeating yourself.

  Philip J. Hanlon

  Attitude, Teaching, Statistics

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• The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

  David Mumford

  Mind, World, Statistics

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• Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality.

  Martin Gardner

  Real, Math, Neutrons

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• I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways."

  G. H. Hardy

  Lying, Two, Numbers

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• 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.

  Arthur Eddington

  Believe, Numbers, Mathematics

  1938 Tarner Lecture.

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• Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? ... Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

  Paul Halmos

  Fighting, Example, Doe

  "I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography". Book by Paul Halmos, 1985.

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• Mathematics was born and nurtured in a cultural environment. Without the perspective which the cultural background affords, a proper appreciation of the content and state of present-day mathematics is hardly possible.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Appreciation, Math, Perspective

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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, Math

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

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• Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.

  Hermann Weyl

  Couple, Book, Math

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• To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

  Arthur Eddington

  Cat, Math, Would Be

  Arthur Eddington (1933). “The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900-1931”, p.103, Cambridge University Press

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• It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical significance.

  Bertrand Russell

  Kindness, Philosophical, Math

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• How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

  Edmund Leach

  Hope, Math, Thinking

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• A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Math, Mathematics

  "The Mathematical Experience". Book by Philip J. Davis, "Underneath the Fig Leaf," p.89, 1980.

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