Mathematician Quotes - Page 22

• The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Beauty, Truth, Math

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• The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of his imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. What he is to imagine is a matter for his own caprice; he is not thereby discovering the fundamental principles of the universe nor becoming acquainted with the ideas of God.

  J. W. N. Sullivan

  Math, Ideas, Imagination

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• Mathematicians seem to have no difficulty in creating new concepts faster than the old ones become well understood.

  Edward Norton Lorenz

  Creating, Mathematics, Faster

  "A scientist by choice". Speech by acceptance of the Kyoto Prize, 1991.

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• It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

  Steven Weinberg

  Spooky, Physicist, Positively

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• I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.

  John Pople

  Branches, Modern, Scientist

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• Work/Loaf Ratio”...I have spent fourteen years perfecting... I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of the “W/LR” save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos.

  Gary Reilly

  Years, Bores You, Long

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• Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

  Larry Wall

  Boring, Perl, Values

  Usenet article <199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org>, 1997.

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• We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

  Thomas Reid

  Philosophy, Party, Issues

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• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

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• Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.

  John Forbes Nash

  Thinking, Vacation, Years

  "John F. Nash Jr. - Biographical". "Les Prix Nobel" ("The Nobel Prizes 1994") edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. 1995.

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• A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician .

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Taken, Example, May

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1982). “Writings of Charles S. Peirce: 1857-1866”, p.268, Indiana University Press

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• Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

  George Eliot

  Men, Mad, Monsters

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.135

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• Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics - at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math typically focuses on learning procedures to solve highly stereotyped problems. Professional mathematicians think a certain way to solve real problems, problems that can arise from the everyday world, or from science, or from within mathematics itself. The key to success in school math is to learn to think inside-the-box. In contrast, a key feature of mathematical thinking is thinking outside-the-box - a valuable ability in today's world.

  Keith Devlin

  Education, Real, School

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• The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

  George Henry Lewes

  Wise, Moving, May

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• Nobody listens to mathematicians.

  Carl Sagan

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.289, Ballantine Books

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• In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Writing, Wish, Mathematical

  William Stanley Jevons (1970). “The Theory of Political Economy”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Man is full of desires: he loves only those who can satisfy them all. "This man is a good mathematician," someone will say. But I have no concern for mathematics; he would take me for a proposition. "That one is a good soldier." He would take me for a besieged town. I need, that is to say, a decent man who can accommodate himself to all my desires in a general sort of way.

  Blaise Pascal

  Love, Math, Men

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• Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary and inevitable, but it is impossible to foresee their consequences. These have only been found out by long study, extending over many centuries. Much of our knowledge is due to a comparatively few great mathematicians such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, or Riemann; few careers can have been more satisfying than theirs. They have contributed something to human thought even more lasting than great literature, since it is independent of language.

  Edward Charles Titchmarsh

  Independent, Careers, Long

  "Mathematical Maxims and Minims". Book by Nicholas J. Rose, 1986.

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• Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Real, Interesting, Mathematics

  Richard P. Feynman (2014). “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter”, p.63, Princeton University Press

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• Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.

  G. H. Hardy

  Silly, Creative, Desire

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

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• "Do you know," the Devil confided, "not even the best mathematicians on other planets - all far ahead of yours - have solved it? Why, there is a chap on Saturn - he looks something like a mushroom on stilts - who solves partial differential equations mentally; and even he's given up."

  Arthur Porges

  Mushrooms, Devil, Saturn

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• I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through the process of 'seeing'.

  Roger Penrose

  Plato, Ideas, Mind

  Roger Penrose (1999). “The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”, p.554, OUP Oxford

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• An axiomatic system comprises axioms and theorems and requires a certain amount of hand-eye coordination before it works. A formal system comprises an explicit list of symbols, an explicit set of rules governing their cohabitation, an explicit list of axioms, and, above all, an explicit list of rules explicitly governing the steps that the mathematician may take in going from assumptions to conclusions. No appeal to meaning nor to intuition. Symbols lose their referential powers; inferences become mechanical.

  David Berlinski

  Eye, Hands, Intuition

  David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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• The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. 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

  Success, Math, Games

  "Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth". Book by Norbert Wiener, 1964.

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• I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Nature, Math, Talking

  James Joseph Sylvester (2008). “The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester”, p.72, American Mathematical Soc.

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