Best 579 quotes in «mathematics quotes» category

But anything that can be called "rigor" is lost exactly where the things become interesting and non trivial.

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.

Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry.

Cardinal arithmetic will be quite important for us, so we spend some time on it. Since, however, it tends to be trivial, we shall not need to spend much of this time on proofs.

Counting pairs is the oldest trick in combinatorics... Every time we count pairs, we learn something from it.

... combinatorics, a sort of glorified dice-throwing.

Computation involves going from a question to an answer. Mathematics involves going from an answer to a question.

Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.

Die mathematische Forschung besteht aus 10% Intuition und 90% Arbeit.

Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

Do not mathematics and all sciences seem full of contradictions and impossibilities to the ignorant, which are all resolved and cleared to those that understand them?

Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

Do not trust financial market risk models. Despite the predilection of some analysts to model the financial markets using sophisticated mathematics, the markets are governed by behavioral science, not physical science.

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?

Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics.

Every dimension is special.

Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Examples ... which might be multiplied ad libitum, show how difficult it often is for an experimenter to interpret his results without the aid of mathematics.

Everything tries to be round.

From nothing I have created another entirely new world.

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

...from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem.

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.

God ever arithmetizes.

Here is something Category-Theorists like: it is trivial, but not trivially trivial.

I always smile when I hear that women cannot excel in mathematics.

How is error possible in mathematics?

Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.

I am ever more intrigued by the correspondence between mathematics and physical facts. The adaptability of mathematics to the description of physical phenomena is uncanny.

[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.

I believe that great success is possible in any field — from music to mathematics to macro trading.

I'd like to take some calculus, too. I have absolutely no ability in that direction and not much interest, either, but there's something going on in mathematics that I don't understand, and I'd like to find out what it is.

I changed the course of my life, from the rigidity of mathematics and the corporate rhythm to a more bohemian world.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

If I had inherited a fortune I should probably not have cast my lot with mathematics.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

I feign no hypotheses.

If it squirms, it's biology; if it stinks, it's chemistry; if it doesn't work, it's physics; and if you can't understand it, it's mathematics.

If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither "number" nor "size", but always form. And among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.

If you go fishing you may not catch any fish. If you don't go fishing, you'll never catch any fish.

If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.