Mathematics Quotes - Page 19

• The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

  Richard Dawkins

  Important, Remember, Frightened

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.75, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.

  Kary Mullis

  Mistake, Science, Ideas

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• Mathematics-a wonderful science, but it hasn't yet come up with a way to divide one tricycle between three small boys.

  Earl Wilson

  Boys, Three, Way

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• The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.

  John von Neumann

  Algorithms, Physics, Theory

  John Von Neumann, F. Bródy, Tibor Vámos (1995). “The Neumann Compendium”, p.453, World Scientific

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• Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

  Sofia Kovalevskaya

  Science, Opportunity, Reality

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• Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied... For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

  G. H. Hardy

  Sensual, Technique, Taught

  "A Mathematician's Apology". Book by G. H. Hardy, 1941.

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• God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

  Andre Weil

  Math, Devil, Existence

  "Mathematical Circles Adieu: A Fourth Collection of Mathematical Stories and Anecdotes". Book by Howard Whitley Eves, 1977.

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• Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

  Paul Lockhart

  Art, Misunderstood, Wells

  "A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form". Book by Paul Lockhart, 2009.

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• I don't believe in mathematics.

  Albert Einstein

  Believe, Math, Science

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• Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

  Carl Sandburg

  Math, Hands, Numbers

  Carl Sandburg, Frances Schoonmaker Bolin (1995). “Carl Sandburg”, p.17, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

  Paul Halmos

  Math, Errors, Trial And Error

  "I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography". Book by Paul Halmos, 1985.

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• One of the big misapprehensions about mathematics that we perpetrate in our classrooms is that the teacher always seems to know the answer to any problem that is discussed.

  Leon Henkin

  Teacher, Math, Answers

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• A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

  G. H. Hardy

  Education, Math, Unique

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.84, Cambridge University Press

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• It took the mob only a moment to remove his head; a century will not suffice to reproduce it.

  Joseph-Louis Lagrange

  Math, Moments, Century

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• How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

  Stephen Leacock

  Fall, Struggle, Math

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• Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

  John von Neumann

  Math, Science, Men

  Quoted in Gary Zukav, The DancingWu Li Masters (1979)

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• One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes."

  David Eugene Smith

  Religious, Truth, Poetry

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• I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

  Lord Byron

  Math, Two, Giving

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• I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Time, Math, Science

  "The Mind and the Eye: A Study of the Biologist's Standpoint". Book by A. Arber, 1954.

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• The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

  David Mumford

  Mind, World, Statistics

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• In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Inspirational, Real, Math

  Social Studies "Tips for Teens" (1981)

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• You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

  Hermann Hesse

  Reality, Law, Yesterday

  Hermann Hesse (2002). “The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel”, p.168, Macmillan

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• Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Funny, Humorous, Math

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• But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.

  Albert Einstein

  Math, Reason, Natural

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• Mathematics was born and nurtured in a cultural environment. Without the perspective which the cultural background affords, a proper appreciation of the content and state of present-day mathematics is hardly possible.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Appreciation, Math, Perspective

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