Mathematician Quotes - Page 19

• Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Philosophy, Firsts, Principles

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

  Graham Greene

  Truth, Honesty, Kindness

  Graham Greene (1960). “The Heart of The Matter”

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• Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

  Temple Grandin

  Kids, Skills, Autism

  Source: www.kshb.com

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• I don't see how being a faster runner, or a better mathematician makes you 'deserve' access to a better life, or more influence on policy, in the absence of a social decision to play that game in the way it's proposed to be organised for some set of benefits.

  Catherine Wilson

  Games, Play, Decision

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

  Alexander Pope

  Nature, Science, Night

  "Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton" l. 1 (1730) See Squire 1

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• Mathematicians are inexorably drawn to nature, not just describing what is to be found there, but in creating echoes of natural laws.

  Roger Lewin

  Nature, Science, Creating

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• I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Uncles, Different, Want

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

  Andrew Wiles

  Problem, Hypothesis, Riemann

  "Andrew Wiles on Solving Fermat". The NOVA Interview, www.pbs.org. November 1, 2000.

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• In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

  E. O. Wilson

  Two, Harvard, Theory

  "Wilson says selfish people, altruistic groups win: interview". Bloomberg News Interview, www.dailyherald.com. April 17, 2012.

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• Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Kings, Fighting, Winning

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• As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, “I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.”)

  Susan Cain

  Party, Boys, Long

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• Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

  Robert Kanigel

  Nature, Science, Years

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• How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

  Clifford Truesdell

  Science, Years, Swim

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• May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Music, Dream, Thinking

  James Joseph Sylvester, H. F. Baker (2012). “The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester:”, p.419, Cambridge University Press

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• A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Reading, Musician, Bars

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• In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
  As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain.

  Nikolai Lobachevsky

  Imperfection, Effort, Transition

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• Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Men, Humanity, Religion

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• A considreable portion of my high school trigonometry course was devoted to the solution of oblique triangles... I have still not had an excuse for using my talents for solving oblique triangles. If a professional mathematician never uses these dull techniques in a highly varied career, why must all high school students devote several weeks to the subject?

  John G. Kemeny

  School, Careers, Technique

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• Sure, some [teachers] could give the standard limit definitions, but they [the students] clearly did not understand the definitions - and it would be a remarkable student who did, since it took mathematicians a couple of thousand years to sort out the notion of a limit, and I think most of us who call ourselves professional mathematicians really only understand it when we start to teach the stuff, either in graduate school or beyond.

  Keith Devlin

  Teacher, Couple, School

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• Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Bars, Elegance, Standards

  "Economic Analysis". Book by Kenneth E.boulding, revised 1948 edition, p. 236, 1941.

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• Mathematicians have never been in full agreement on their science, though it is said to be the science of self-evident verities -- absolute, indisputable and definitive. They have always been in controversy over developing aspects of mathematics, and they have always considered their own age to be in a period of crisis.

  Henri Lebesgue

  Self, Agreement, Age

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• My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

  James Arthur

  Beautiful, Dad, Believe

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.

  Ernest Nagel

  Nature, Real, Science

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• Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

  Isaac Asimov

  Math, Numbers, Income

  Isaac Asimov (2012). “Prelude to Foundation”, p.25, Spectra

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• We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.

  William Wordsworth

  Pain, Struggle, Knowledge

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth (2015). “Lyrical Ballads and other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (Including Their Thoughts On Poetry Principles and Secrets): Collections of Poetry which marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature, including poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Dungeon, The Nightingale, Dejection: An Ode”, p.211, e-artnow

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