Mathematician Quotes - Page 10

• The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.

  Samuel Johnson

  Science, Law, Ideas

  Samuel Johnson (1820). “The Rambler”, p.74

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• In mathematics, if I find a new approach to a problem, another mathematician might claim that he has a better, more elegant solution. In chess, if anybody claims he is better than I, I can checkmate him.

  Emanuel Lasker

  Might, Chess, Problem

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• Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Book, Knowledge, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1828). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think”, p.149

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• The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.

  Joel Henry Hildebrand

  Teacher, Science, Promise

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• I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.

  Augustin-Louis Cauchy

  Christian, Believe, Mean

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• Both children and adults like me who live with type 1 diabetes need to be mathematicians, physicians, personal trainers, and dietitians all rolled into one.

  Mary Tyler Moore

  Children, Adults, Physicians

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• There is no thing as a man who does not create mathematics and yet is a fine mathematics teacher. Textbooks, course material-these do not approach in importance the communication of what mathematics is really about, of where it is going, and of where it currently stands with respect to the specific branch of it being taught. What really matters is the communication of the spirit of mathematics. It is a spirit that is active rather than contemplative-a spirit of disciplined search for adventures of the intellect. Only as adventurer can really tell of adventures.

  Alfred Adler

  Teacher, Communication, Adventure

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• The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.

  Alfred Adler

  Life, Work, Math

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• When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.

  Bertrand Russell

  Teacher, Character, Science

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”, p.620, Psychology Press

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• Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Preference, Indifferent, Aesthetic

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• True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.

  David O. McKay

  Truth, Lying, Men

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• Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them.

  Jimmy Chin

  Climbing, Interesting, Mind

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• We have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

  James Jeans

  God, Science, Creation

  The Mysterious Universe ch. 5 (1930)

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• Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

  Walt Whitman

  Encouragement, Art, Science

  Walt Whitman (1868). “Poems”, p.46

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• You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

  Hermann Hesse

  Reality, Law, Yesterday

  Hermann Hesse (2002). “The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel”, p.168, Macmillan

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• [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Writing, Mathematics, Abomination

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• [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

  Henry Adams

  Musician, Mathematics, Bores

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• Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, like Riemann before him. Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.

  Michio Kaku

  Life, Science, Men

  "Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension". Book by Michio Kaku, March 24, 1994.

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• The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Nature, Science, Challenges

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• The future mathematician ... should solve problems, choose the problems which are in his line, meditate upon their solution, and invent new problems. By this means, and by all other means, he should endeavor to make his first important discovery: he should discover his likes and dislikes, his taste, his own line.

  George Polya

  Mean, Science, Discovery

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• It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

  Richard Courant

  Motivation, Science, Essence

  "Mathematics in the Modern World". Scientific American, Vol 211, (p. 42), September 1964.

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• ...nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

  James Jeans

  Nature, Science, Drawing

  Sir James Hopwood Jeans (2017). “The Mysterious Universe [New Revised Edition]”, p.113, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.

  Henri Lebesgue

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Math

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• On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.

  Jean Dieudonne

  Real, Believe, Feelings

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• The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Distance, Moving, Science

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