Are you one of my students?’She laughed again. ‘No. No. GCSE maths was enough for me. I hated it.’This angered me. ‘Hated it? How can you hate mathematics? Mathematics is everything.

If you divide something that is essentially one, you will end up with imaginary infinite numbers.

[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...

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a...

Although some of her passages seek to persuade the reader of the meaninglessness and marginalization of the mathematics, Hayles is content to use mathematics as a means for understanding Borges, perhaps in the same way...

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

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside...

As the several items can be exchanged, they must be equal; but in what terms? Not in pounds, yards, or hours; they are equal in value. Then what is wanted is a unit of value...

Life is a linear equation in which you can’t cross multiply! If you think you can do it, you can do it. If you think you can’t do it, you can’t do it. It’s a...

Please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.[Having himself...

I confess that Fermat’s Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, for a multitude of such theorems can easily be set up, which one could neither prove nor disprove. But I...

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t...

This is the team. We’re trying to go to the moon. If you can’t put someone up, please don’t put them down.

It is the story that matters not just the ending.

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

People tend to think that mathematicians always work in sterile conditions, sitting around and staring at the screen of a computer, or at a ceiling, in a pristine office. But in fact, some of the...

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of ‘proving theorems.’ Is a writer’s job mainly that of ‘writing sentences?

If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no...

It is to geometry that we owe in some sort the source of this discovery [of beryllium]; it is that [science] that furnished the first idea of it, and we may say that without it...

Topology is destiny,’ he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

I abandoned the assigned problems in standard calculus textbooks and followed my curiosity. Wherever I happened to be–a Vegas casino, Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, or sweating on the elliptical in Boesel’s Green Microgym–I asked myself,...

No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a...

Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second...

Therefor I doubt not but, if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, ‘that the three angles of a triangle should...

I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically… the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature… I shall, therefore, treat the...

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the...

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...

…I guess I can put two and two together.””Sometimes the answer’s four,” I said, “and sometimes it’s twenty-two…

One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else....

The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is...

There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our...

Formal mathematics is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppyyour mathematics is.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics...

Surely, the gods’ judgment is certain. But as for us, we must be satisfied to ‘come close’ to those things, for we are men, who speak according to what is likely, and whose lectures resemble...

An essential pedagogic step here is to relegate the teaching of mathematical methods in economics to mathematics departments. Any mathematical training in economics, if it occurs at all, should come after students have at the...

…The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God’s notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant...

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.

A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can’t tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.

How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No...

Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied ‘Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.

When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.

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...