Mathematician Quotes - Page 12

• Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays.

  Philip J. Davis

  Sunday, Typical, Weekdays

  8 Copy quote

• As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.

  Norman Maclean

  Beautiful, Father, Able

  Norman Maclean (2009). “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The inner circle of pure mathematicians will respond to the book with delight.

  Philip J. Davis

  Book, Circles, Delight

  4 Copy quote

• However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

  Graham Greene

  Suicide, Suicidal, Men

  "The Comedians". Book by Graham Greene. Part 1, Chapter 4, Section 1, 1966.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

  Alexander Grothendieck

  Math, Understanding, Would Be

  107 Copy quote

• To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy.

  Frederick The Great

  Eye, Math, Half

  7 Copy quote

• There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician.

  Edward Kasner

  Education, Discovery, Philosopher

  6 Copy quote

• Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

  Paul Halmos

  Math, Errors, Trial And Error

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

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it's true. Otherwise, we won't know anything at all.

  Ian Stewart

  Believe, Reality, Needs

  Ian Stewart (2007). “Letters to a Young Mathematician”, p.79, Basic Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whenever I want to represent or depict the official version, I will refer to them as 'mathematicians' or 'mathematical physicists' or idiots or something like that. There are no physicists in mainstream 'Physics.' From Newton to Einstein to Hawking, they are all just mathematicians as far as Science and Physics are concerned.

  Bill Gaede

  Want, Idiot, Physics

  4 Copy quote

• Another advantage of a mathematical statement is that it is so definite that it might be definitely wrong; and if it is found to be wrong, there is a plenteous choice of amendments ready in the mathematicians' stock of formulae. Some verbal statements have not this merit; they are so vague that they could hardly be wrong, and are correspondingly useless.

  Lewis Fry Richardson

  Math, Choices, Merit

  7 Copy quote

• Mathematicians can and do fill in gaps, correct errors, and supply more detail and more careful scholarship when they are called on or motivated to do so. Our system is quite good at producing reliable theorems that can be solidly backed up. It's just that the reliability does not primarily come from mathematicians formally checking formal arguments; it comes from mathematicians thinking carefully and critically about mathematical ideas.

  William Thurston

  Math, Thinking, Errors

  12 Copy quote

• It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

  George Santayana

  Song, Art, Math

  George Santayana (2014). “Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy”, p.81, Cambridge University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new.

  William Thurston

  Math, Ideas, Community

  30 Copy quote

• Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries.

  John Locke

  Country, Kings, Lying

  5 Copy quote

• There was a Russian cult of eunuchs known as the Skoptsy who were renowned for their proficiency as mathematicians, bankers, and moneylenders. Outsiders called them rapacious but this was simply their jealousy speaking - when one is freed from sexual desire, or sexual desire is transmuted into work, suddenly the world becomes engorged with possibilities.

  Hamilton Morris

  Desire, World, Outsiders

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... there are those who believe that mathematics can sustain itself and grow without any further contact with anything outside itself, and those who believe that nature is still and always will be one of the main (if not the main) sources of mathematical inspiration. The first group is identified as "pure mathematicians" (though "purist" would be more adequate) while the second is, with equal inadequacy, referred to as "applied".

  Mark Kac

  Believe, Inspiration, Groups

  6 Copy quote

• What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians?

  Albert Einstein

  Math, Battle, Frogs

  6 Copy quote

• When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, "one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world."

  G. H. Hardy

  Art, Science, Men

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.143, Cambridge University Press

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this; like great chessplayers who play sixteen games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.

  Winston Churchill

  Epilepsy, Games, Play

  Winston Churchill (2010). “My Early Life: 1874-1904”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's true we pure mathematicians are connected to a different world. But it is a very real world nevertheless.

  Isadore Singer

  Real, Different, World

  7 Copy quote

• Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Fields, Concerts, Pianist

  4 Copy quote

• ...a major triumph of mathematical imagination: the use of visual imagery to condense a large quantity of information into a single comprehensible picture... Mathematicians are just beginning to understand these basic building blocks of change and to analyze how they combine. The methodology involved has a very different spirit from traditional modeling with differential equations: it is more like chemistry than calculus, requiring careful counterpoint between analysis and synthesis.

  Ian Stewart

  Beauty, Art, Block

  4 Copy quote

• The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.

  Francis Bacon

  Nature, Science, Views

  Francis Bacon, William Rawley (1863). “Translations of the philosophical works”, p.68

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical [and physical] beauty.

  Ian Stewart

  Beauty, Art, Views

  8 Copy quote