Mathematics

General

• "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein
• "As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school." --Cokie Roberts
• "Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater." --Albert Einstein
• "From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." --Sir James Jeans
• "God does arithmetic." --Karl Friedrich Gauss
• "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." --Albert Einstein
• "He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god." --Plato
• "How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?" --Bertrand Russell
• "I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing." --Aldous Huxley
• "I don't believe in mathematics." --Albert Einstein
• "I have no faith in political arithmetic." --Adam Smith
• "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." --Ernest Rutherford
• "It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it." --Andrejs Dunkels
• "Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics." --Simeon Poisson
• "Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning." --John Locke
• "Mathematics consists of proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way." --George Polye
• "Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper." --David Hilbert
• "[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence." --William Wordsworth
• "Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state." --Plato
• "Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself." --Abraham Kaplan
• "Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things." --Jules Henri Poincare
• "Mathematics is the only instructional material that can be presented in an entirely undogmatic way." --Max Dehn
• "Mathematics is the science of what is clear by itself." --Carl Jacobi
• "Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense." --Charles Darwin
• "Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform." --Bertrand Russell
• "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so." --Galileo Galilei
• "Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful." --Martin Luther
• "No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically." --Leonardo da Vinci
• "Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?" --Helen Keller
• "Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare." --Rene Descartes
• "Pure mathematics, may it never be of any use to anyone." --Henry John Stephen Smith
• "Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated." --M. C. Reed
• "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore." --Albert Einstein
• "The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality." --David Hilbert
• "The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being." --Gottfried Whilhem Liebniz
• "The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man." --David Hilbert
• "The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal." --Plato
• "The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience." --Immanuel Kant
• "The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life." --Ernest Renan
• "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Benajamin Disraeli
• "There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world." --Nikolai Lobatchevsky
• "I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate." --David Mumford

• "Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
  • Bertrand Russell, referring to the axiomatic method, where certain properties of an (otherwise unknown) structure are assumed and consequences thereof are then logically derived.

• "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
  • John Von Neumann

• "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."
  • Bertrand Russell, in Study of Mathematics, about the beauty of Mathematics.

• "Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere."
  • W.S. Anglin , in Mathematics and History, elucidating the symmetry between the creative and logical aspects of mathematics.
• "If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy."
  • Alfréd Rényi

• "One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them."
  • Heinrich Hertz

• "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
  • Robert Heinlein

• "The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought."
  • Havelock Ellis

• "Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another."
  • Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle

• "In great mathematics there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy."
  • G. H. Hardy

• "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophesies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell."
  • St. Augustine

See also

• Mathematicians
• Statistics