Best 579 quotes in «mathematics quotes» category

The only reason that we like complex numbers is that we don't like real numbers.

The only time a question should be asked is when all other possibilities of finding the answer for yourself have been eliminated.

The origins of graph theory are humble, even frivolous.

Theoretical Computer Science is just as useless as everything we mathematicians do.

The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.

There is an explicit way to define what explicit is.

The purpose of life is to conjecture and prove.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

There are no sects in geometry.

There is an underlying timelessness in the basic conversation that is mathematics.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.

There are a lot of very strong connections with music and mathematics. They both can work in patterns and sequences and repetitions.

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.

There is no nature at an instant.

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

There is no problem that cannot be solved.

There is no significant difference between human activities and those by amoebas and even bacteria, well, on the GRAND SCALE.

There is no smallest among the small and no largest among the large, but always something still smaller and something still larger.

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.

There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey.

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

There is something in statistics that makes it very similar to astrology.

The student is best taught who is told the least

The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.

The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.

The science of mathematics performs more than it promises, but the science of metaphysics promises more than it performs.

The self is the resultant of the interest of the genes.

The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.

The standard model gives us an accuracy of ten decimal digits, this is an amazing success that has never been achieved before in science.

The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.

The transfinite numbers are in a sense the new irrationalities [ ... they] stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers.

The very term 'combinatorial methods' has an oxymoronic character.

The unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in science is a gift we neither understand nor deserve.

The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

This method of deduction ... is often called "combinatory". Its usefulness is not exhausted at this stage, but it does even at the outset lead to some valuable conclusions.

This is not mathematics; this is theology.

To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples.

To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.

This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

Thought, then, is the execution of this computer code.

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. G. is (x + 1)- ecrable.

We can... treat only the geometrical aspects of mathematics and shall be satisfied in having shown that there is no problem of the truth of geometrical axioms and that no special geometrical visualization exists in mathematics.

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.