Best 69 quotes in «mathematician quotes» category

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 by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything. There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.

What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.

You can recognize a mathematical physicist because he always asks you for your credentials or lists his without you asking for them.

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician.

Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

Because Mathematicians frequently make use of Time, they ought to have a distinct idea of the meaning of that Word, otherwise they are Quacks.

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

I believe that proving is not a natural activity for mathematicians.

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen.

It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.

James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work.

Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur Mathematics is written for mathematicians De Revolutionibus

Pointing out that countless great mathematicians had tried to solve the problem and failed before you came along is in particularly bad taste and should be avoided completely.

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.

We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics).

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

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 pursued science always with mathematical views. He seemed little attentive to the labours of men except when they countenanced or confirmed his own ideas... He was a very disinterested man, seemed to have no ambition beyond that of being thought a good Philosopher. He was a very coarse Experimenter & almost always found the results he required.—Memory & observation were subordinate qualities in his mind. He followed with ardour analogies & inductions & however his claims to originality may admit of question I have no doubt that he was one of the most original philosophers of his time & one of the most ingenious.

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

To every problem there is already a solution, whether you know it or not. To every sum in there is already a correct answer, whether the mathematician has found it or not.

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 roughly. By Ohm's discovery a large part of the domain of electricity became annexed by Coulomb's discovery of the law of inverse squares, and completely annexed by Green's investigations. Poisson attacked the difficult problem of induced magnetisation, and his results, though differently expressed, are still the theory, as a most important first approximation. Ampere brought a multitude of phenomena into theory by his investigations of the mechanical forces between conductors supporting currents and magnets. Then there were the remarkable researches of Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics and the induction of currents. These were rather long in being brought from the crude experimental state to a compact system, expressing the real essence. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Faraday was not a mathematician. It can scarcely be doubted that had he been one, he would have anticipated much later work. He would, for instance, knowing Ampere's theory, by his own results have readily been led to Neumann's theory, and the connected work of Helmholtz and Thomson. But it is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.

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

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

Even a pure mathematician may find his appreciation of this geometry [applied geometry] quickened, since there is no mathematician so pure that he feels no interest at all in the physical world; but, in so far as he succumbs to this temptation, he will be abandoning his purely mathematical position.

Et peut-être la posterité me saura gré de lui avoir fait connaître que les Anciens n’ont pas tout su. (And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.)

Daniel Bernoulli: "Then this distinguished scholar informed me that the celebrated mathematician, Cramer, had developed a theory on the same subject several years before I produced my paper. Indeed I have found his theory so similar to mine that it seems miraculous that we independently reached sch close agreement on this sort of subject.