Mathematician Quotes - Page 23

• Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this . . . . The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents. . . . Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer.

  Jean le Rond d'Alembert

  Math, Men, Differences

  29 Copy quote

• Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Art, Inspiration, Past

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.

  Thomas Paine

  Wise, Men, Ideas

  The Rights of Man pt. 1 (1791)

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Years, People, Mind

  "An Age-old Puzzle, Solved Modestly". articles.chicagotribune.com. July 5, 1993.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

  Hans Reichenbach

  Science, Space, Philosopher

  9 Copy quote

• The desire to explore thus marks out the mathematician. This is one of the forces making for the growth of mathematics. The mathematician enjoys what he already knows; he is eager for more knowledge.

  W. W. Sawyer

  Education, Math, Growth

  4 Copy quote

• I have created a new universe from nothing.

  Janos Bolyai

  Universe

  4 Copy quote

• Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen. Spricht man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie alles in ihre eigene Sprache, und so wird es alsobald etwas ganz anderes. Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchmen. Whenever you say anything or talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and right away it is something completely different.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Men, Say Anything

  4 Copy quote

• Even in the realm of things which do not claim actuality, and do not even claim possibility, there exist beyond dispute sets which are infinite.

  Bernard Bolzano

  Infinite, Possibility, Disputes

  Bernard Bolzano (2014). “Paradoxes of the Infinite (Routledge Revivals)”, p.84, Routledge

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

  Stefan Banach

  Analogies

  14 Copy quote

• Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Want, Limits

  21 Copy quote

• A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory.

  Paul Erdos

  Coffee, Cups, Mathematics

  8 Copy quote

• Poincaré [was] the last man to take practically all mathematics, pure and applied, as his province. ... Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré had, and none in his superior in the gift of clear exposition.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Men, Vision, Lasts

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps... some day the precision of the data will be brought so far that the mathematician will be able to calculate at his desk the outcome of any chemical combination, in the same way, so to speak, as he calculates the motions of celestial bodies.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Data, Body

  19 Copy quote

• Mathematics is a world created by the mind of men, and mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!

  Constance Reid

  Education, Math, Men

  5 Copy quote

• I work with a lot of mathematicians, and one thing I notice about them is that they are not particularly fast with numbers; in fact some of them are rather slow. This is not a bad thing; they are slow because they think deeply and carefully about mathematics.

  Jo Boaler

  Thinking, Numbers, Facts

  28 Copy quote

• I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

  G. H. Hardy

  Real, Science, Numbers

  57 Copy quote

• Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel... We find it in the delightful myth of Antaeus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid... Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic - and this we know it is, for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

  Nikola Tesla

  Men, Ideas, Space

  "Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency". Nikola Tesla's Address to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, February 1892.

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• We don't need no more rappers, we don't need no more basketball players, no more football players. We need more thinkers. We need more scientists. We need more managers. We need more mathematicians. We need more teachers. We need more people who care; you know what I'm saying? We need more women, mothers, fathers, we need more of that, we don't need any more entertainers

  Tupac Shakur

  Basketball, Football, Mother

  31 Copy quote

• The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

  Marcus du Sautoy

  Phones, Data, Space

  4 Copy quote

• I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."

  Michael Loceff

  Opposites, People, Watches

  "The Worst Day Ever". Interview with James Surowiecki, www.slate.com. January 17, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

  Robert Musil

  Lying, Intellectual, Analogies

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.42, University of Chicago Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

  Galileo Galilei

  Philosophy, Sky, Fields

  10 Copy quote

• That's my mathematician who examines problems which I put before him and checks their validity. You see, I am not myself a good mathematician.

  Albert Einstein

  Collaboration, Problem, Checks

  7 Copy quote

• Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Men, Design, Elements

  Leonardo Da Vinci “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, Lulu.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source