I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating… The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to...

He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss}

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little...

How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? … the skeleton of our understanding, … and actually they are the majority. … We have here a problem that...

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn...

Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down...

Wherefore, I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for...

Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.

The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern...

Gosta da música, que é a mesma coisa que ouvir geometria

Euclid’s Elements has been for nearly twenty-two centuries the encouragement and guide of that scientific thought which is one thing with the progress of man from a worse to a better state. The encouragement; for...

Nature seems to take advantage of the simple mathematical representations of the symmetry laws. When one pauses to consider the elegance and the beautiful perfection of the mathematical reasoning involved and contrast it with the...

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn’t stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the...

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula,...

For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning...

I’ve sort of been slacking off in my voodoo studies.I’ve trigonometry, you know?

No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a “mixed number ” while 5/2 is an “improper fraction.” They’re EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same...

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment… We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like...

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

Sokszög definíciója:Van szemközti oldala.

My math is so fuzzy you should pet it. Four minus two isn’t two, because between two and four minus two is an infinite number of numbers.

But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms...

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math...

Ohm found that the results could be summed up in such a simple law that he who runs may read it, and a schoolboy now can predict what a Faraday then could only guess at...

I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology...

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin.

Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplestpossible things are imaginary.

I do not think the division of the subject into two parts – into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics...

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems—general and specific statements—can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It...

Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don’t look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact,...

Can I just say that I don’t care if two planes or trains or whatever take off from different locations at different times and travel at different speeds. I am not traffic control, so why...

[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar...

And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

Oh, figures!’ answered Ned. ‘You can make figures do whatever you want.

Done any exciting sums lately?””I don’t just do sums,” Miles told her. “There’s much more to my life than that.””Is there?” Alicia asked, trying to sound interested.”Yes,” said Miles. “Sometimes I draw graphs.

There is a largeness about mathematics that transcends race and time; mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars.

Lynn, she saved half our faction from this stuff,” says Marlene, tapping the bandage on her arm from where the Dauntless traitors shot her. “Well, half of half of our faction.””In some circles they call...

Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.

As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra....

Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a...

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it...

Everybody believes in the exponential law of errors: the experimenters, because they think it can be proved by mathematics; and the mathematicians, because they believe it has been established by observation.

Turing attended Wittgenstein’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems....

If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,—then it is verily...

Why don’t we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don’t trust them, that we think it’s too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments...

I’ll tell you once,and I’ll tell you again.There’s always a primebetween n and 2n.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.