Mathematician Quotes - Page 14

• One can re-create what was in the mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recapture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable of perception and expression in the individual, - that is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in its original fulness.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Art, Light, Expression

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• Theoretical Computer Science is just as useless as everything we mathematicians do.

  Jennifer Tour Chayes

  Science, Useless, Computer

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• As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

  Abraham Robinson

  Views, Ideas, Minorities

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• I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

  David Chalmers

  Lying, Years, Ideas

  "David Chalmers on the Big Conundrum: Consciousness". Interview with Natasha Mitchel, www.abc.net.au. August 10, 2003.

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• A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

  Norbert Wiener

  Successful, Games, Chess Game

  Norbert Wiener (1953). “Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth”

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• The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Community, Musical, Satisfaction

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• The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have.

  Christopher Zeeman

  Believe, Science, Giving

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• Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books?

  J. Arthur Thomson

  Book, Knowledge, Science

  J. Arthur Thomson (2008). “The Outline of Science, First Volume”, p.3, Wildside Press LLC

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• Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

  Daniel Tammet

  Order, Legs, Ends

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• Pointing out that countless great mathematicians had tried to solve the problem and failed before you came along is in particularly bad taste and should be avoided completely.

  Terence Tao

  Taste, Problem, Should

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• People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the best ideas come when you least expect them, possibly through annoying industrial noise.

  Edward Frenkel

  Thinking, Ideas, Office

  Edward Frenkel (2013). “Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality”, p.145, Basic Books

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• Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects; they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.

  Henri Poincare

  Teaching, Long, Important

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• My interests started about in science and in mathematics, I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

  David Chalmers

  Mathematics, Interest

  "David Chalmers on the Big Conundrum: Consciousness". Interview with Natasha Mitchell, www.abc.net.au. August 10, 2003.

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• A mathematician of the first rank, Laplace quickly revealed himself as only a mediocre administrator; from his first work we saw that we had been deceived. Laplace saw no question from its true point of view; he sought subtleties everywhere; had only doubtful ideas, and finally carried the spirit of the infinitely small into administration.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Work, Math, Ideas

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• I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, Book, Offering

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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• Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.

  Richard Hamming

  Toes, Computer, Scientist

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• I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.

  G. H. Hardy

  Good Man, Example, Waste

  "Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work". Book by G. H. Hardy, 1940.

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• As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.

  Stanislaw Ulam

  Self Confidence, Brilliant, Complicated

  "Adventures of a Mathematician". Book by Stanislaw Ulam, 3rd edition. Chapter 4: "Princeton Days", p. 76, 1991.

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• Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss's investment methods.

  William Poundstone

  Years, Salary, Cash

  William Poundstone (2010). “Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street”, p.132, Macmillan

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• It is cheaper to pay mathematicians and computer scientists to design algorithms that will eliminate webspamming, rather than to pay lawyers to do lawsuits.

  Jennifer Tour Chayes

  Science, Design, Algorithms

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• The computer was, to the best of my feelings about the subject, not thinking like a mathematician, and it was much more successful, because it was thinking not like a mathematician.

  Kenneth Appel

  Successful, Science, Thinking

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• We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mean, Science, Mathematics

  Richard P Feynman (2014). “Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton”, p.84, Random House

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• The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

  Martin Gardner

  Computer, Breeding

  Martin Gardner (1961). “The 2nd Scientific American book of mathematical puzzles & diversions, a new selection”

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• The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since.

  William Poundstone

  Law, Numbers, Misunderstood

  William Poundstone (2010). “Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street”, p.102, Macmillan

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• I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.

  Donald Knuth

  Thinking, Discipline, Algorithms

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