Mathematician Quotes - Page 20

• All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another.

  William S. Burroughs

  Honesty, Pain, Voice

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.

  Bertrand Russell

  Race, Odds, Survival

  Interview in "Playboy", 10, No. 3, 42, (March 1963) in "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture" by Kenneth Rose, (p. 39), 2004.

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• Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Truth, Science, Men

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• As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

  Paul Dirac

  Nature, Science, Interesting

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• For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Ideas, Long

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• In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."

  Eric Temple Bell

  Seven Years, Order, Abel

  Eric Temple Bell (1938). “The queen of the sciences”

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• In 1975, ... [speaking with Shiing Shen Chern], I told him I had finally learned ... the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern-Weil theorem. I said I found it amazing that gauge fields are exactly connections on fiber bundles, which the mathematicians developed without reference to the physical world. I added, "this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere." He immediately protested: "No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real."

  Chen-Ning Yang

  Beautiful, Real, Science

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• Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

  Edwin Howard Armstrong

  Art, Book, Science

  "Electronics" by P. Arun, (p. 310), 2005.

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• The mathematical fraternity is a little like a self-perpetuating priesthood. The mathematicians of today teach the mathematicians of tomorrow and, in effect, decide whom to admit to the priesthood.

  Paul Halmos

  Self, Littles, Today

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• But as no two (theoreticians) agree on this (skin friction) or any other subject, some not agreeing today with what they wrote a year ago, I think we might put down all their results, add them together, and then divide by the number of mathematicians, and thus find the average coefficient of error. (1908)

  Hiram Maxim

  Science, Thinking, Errors

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• I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.

  Steven Strogatz

  Wise, Smart, Moving

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• The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

  Eugene Wigner

  Believe, Perfection, Miracle

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• Spending time with math people is a lot of fun. As a result of the play, I've had semi-drunken dinners with mathematicians all over the country. I recommend the experience.

  David Auburn

  Country, Fun, Math

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• The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Technology, Men

  "From Companion's Lost Diary, A Portrait of Einstein in Old Age" by Dennis Overbye, www.nytimes.com. April 24, 2004.

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• I like to think of mathematicians as forming a nation of our own without distinctions of geographical origin, race, creed, sex, age or even time... all dedicated to the most beautiful of the arts and sciences.

  Julia Robinson

  Beautiful, Art, Sex

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• Never compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be as an individual--not to be more special than the kid sitting next to her.

  Rafe Esquith

  Baseball, Children, Kids

  Rafe Esquith (2007). “Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56”, p.80, Penguin

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• They [the mathematicians of the Enlightenment] defined their terms vaguely and used their methods loosely, and the logic of their arguments was made to fit the dictates of their intuition. In short, they broke all the laws of rigor and of mathematical decorum. The veritable orgy which followed the introduction of the infinitesimals... was but a natural reaction. Intuition had too long been held imprisoned by the severe rigor of the Greeks. Now it broke loose, and there were no Euclids to keep its romantic flight in check.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Law, History, Long

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• It strikes me that mathematical writing is similar to using a language. To be understood you have to follow some grammatical rules. However, in our case, nobody has taken the trouble of writing down the grammar; we get it as a baby does from parents, by imitation of others. Some mathematicians have a good ear; some not (and some prefer the slangy expressions such as 'iff'). That's life.

  Jean-Pierre Serre

  Baby, Taken, Writing

  "Some Hints on Mathematical Style". Letter to David Goss, August 2016.

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• Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

  Andrew Wiles

  Love, Challenges, Trying

  "Andrew Wiles on Solving Fermat". "The Proof", episode of "NOVA", www.pbs.org. November 01, 2000.

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• Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

  Aristotle

  Doe, Needs, Use

  Aristotle (2016). “Physics”, p.82, Aristotle

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• In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Theoretical Physics, Frustrated, Way

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• Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Self Esteem, Thinking, Long

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• It is possible for a mathematician to be "too strong" for a given occasion. He forces through, where another might be driven to a different, and possible more fruitful, approach. (So a rock climber might force a dreadful crack, instead of finding a subtle and delicate route.)

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Strong, Rocks, Different

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.144, Cambridge University Press

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• The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Science, Two, Achievement

  Gian-Carlo Rota (2009). “Indiscrete Thoughts”, p.214, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Neither you nor I nor anybody else knows what makes a mathematician tick. It is not a question of cleverness. I know many mathematicians who are far abler than I am, but they have not been so lucky. An illustration may be given by considering two miners. One may be an expert geologist, but he does not find the golden nuggets that the ignorant miner does.

  Louis J. Mordell

  Math, Two, Illustration

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