[Benjamin Peirce’s] lectures were not easy to follow. They were never carefully prepared. The work with which he rapidly covered the blackboard was very illegible, marred with frequent erasures, and not infrequent mistakes (he worked...

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25...

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.

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,...

I don’t believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won’t persuade mother nature to alter her ways....

The only reason I don’t know more about love is because there just isn’t more to know. In fact, I’ve reduced love to a mathematical formula: Hdgk(X)=H2k(X,Q)∩Hk,k(X). Actually, that’s not right. That’s the statement piece...

Mom actually said that?” Cassie’s face shown with happiness. “She always hated my math!””Nah,” Martin said. “She was just being that way for you. She thought it was what you needed to hear. If parents...

Tengo’s lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the...

Fermat žil poměrně stranou od hlavních center matematického života, a byl tedy odkázán na korespondenci. Rozeslal jí hodně a měl při tom zvláštní a pro partnery asi dost rozčilující zvyk – posílal jim hotové matematické...

Shebna scraped the tablet clean and began drawing circles in the soft clay. “Suppose you had six figs and you ate two. How many would–“”Four.” Hezekiah answered before Shebna finished, and the tutor’s thick black...

It is the story that matters not just the ending.

The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.

Herding is tough,If a herder leaves his goats they deviate from their path and So is maths,If u stop practicing,your concepts recede from view

In geometry, whenever we had to find the area of a circle, pi * radius squared, I would get really hungry for pie. Square pie.

To the average mathematician who merely wants to know his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert’s program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game...

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics...

The Dome.” Perfectly round, this room is one continuous curved wall of books. A copper dome sits on top with four stained glass windows fitted tight to allow for natural light to stream in. The...

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The...

We hate math,’ say 10 in 4……a majority of Pakistani!

However, as I hope to persuade you, there are some interesting connections between science and magic. They share a belief, as one mathematician put it, that what is visible is merely a superficial reality, not...

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though...

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led...

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

…and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of ‘arithmeticians.

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy’s main source of problems. That is why it is of...

Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, “God, it’s cold.”Question: What’s the probability they will kiss?

Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is what makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.

… I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and...

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first...

{Before the time of it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research} was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood...

He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication...

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness–cry and then walk–but what really...

It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to...

A distinguished writer [Siméon Denis Poisson] has thus stated the fundamental definitions of the science:’The probability of an event is the reason we have to believe that it has taken place, or that it will...

Algebra is numbers forgetting why they’re letters.

The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a...

As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students’ heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world’s riddles...

I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named “Further Maths”. It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.

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...

Be honest: did you actually read [the above geometric proof]? Of course not. Who would want to? The effect of such a production being made over something so simple is to make people doubt their...

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in...

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they’re extremely hard to solve. There’s no...

The manner of Demoivre’s death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each...

But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of Hilbert, we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they...

Réduites à des théories générales, les mathématiques seraient une belle forme sans contenu.Reduced to general theories, mathematics would be a beautiful form without content.

Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would...

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical...

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words ‘Thus it plainly appears’, I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

In life two negatives don’t make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.