These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. ‘Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.’ …...

What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted...

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...

I think you mother has Asperger’s,” Georgie had said to Neal.”They didn’t get Asperger’s int he ’50s.””I’m just saying maybe she’s on the the spectrum.””She’s just a math teacher.

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

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted...

Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all.

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and...

Littlewood, on Hardy’s own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who...

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...

Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.

A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can’t even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. … Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at...

A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.

John Dalton was a very singular Man: He has none of the manners or ways of the world. A tolerable mathematician He gained his livelihood I believe by teaching the mathematics to young people. He...

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most...

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...

It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while...

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions … it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid … drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.