What comes, is called.

[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to...

Mathematics is the art of explanation.

I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don’t know what you’d call it. A socktagon?

THINK, and do not sacrifice yourself to mathematical magic.

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur...

All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other, and all means of discovering them are equally admissible.

That’s because, if correct, a mathematical formula expresses an eternal truth about the universe. Hence no one can claim ownership of it; it is ours to share. Rich or poor, black or white, young or...

Je me rends parfaitement compte du desagreable effet que produit sur la majorite de l’humanité, tout ce qui se rapporte, même au plus faible dègré, á des calculs ou raisonnements mathematiques.I am well aware of...

…in pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers...

Schools were started to train human talents… The Guild… emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs… politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity...

Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said...

To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed...

They shouldn’t be allowed to teach math so early in the morning.

There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else — but persistent.

It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together.

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his...

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise...

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

Monty Jones: Dad, is there a word to describe answers that are completely correct but entirely useless under the circumstances?Professor Jones: Yes, yes there is.

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.’ …...

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is...

It is an unfortunate fact that proofs can be very misleading. Proofs exist to establish once and for all, according to very high standards, that certain mathematical statements are irrefutable facts. What is unfortunate about...

Anything you try to quantify can be divided into any number of “anythings,” or become the thing – the unit – itself. And what is any number, itself, but just another unit of measurement? What...

The genius of Laplace was a perfect sledge hammer in bursting purely mathematical obstacles; but, like that useful instrument, it gave neither finish nor beauty to the results. In truth, in truism if the reader...

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.

99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.

De mathematen worden samen met de natuur- en scheikundigen, de medicijnmannen van de twintigste eeuw genoemd, waarbij velen zich dan nog zeer argwanend afvragen of deze profeten van de nieuwe tijd het geluk van de...

Certainly not! I didn’t build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That’s hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like…”Klapaucius thought, and thought some more....

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

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...

In Mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

… Fourier’s great mathematical poem …{Referring to Joseph Fourier’s mathematical theory of the conduction of heat, one of the precursors to thermodynamics.}

dialect” are themselves fuzzy.

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his...

Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

Seven.” Switch to eight, and the majority of humanity was lost.

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of...

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion—not because it makes no sense to...

In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.

There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that’s because you’re dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion....

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he’s not dead.

More often than not, at the end of the day (or a month, or a year), you realize that your initial idea was wrong, and you have to try something else. These are the moments...

A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it’s hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character...

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase...

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.