Best 69 quotes in «mathematician quotes» category

... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician’s art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it’s fascinating, it’s fun, and it’s free!

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up.

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.

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 mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a severely technical sense—that of the modern postulational method which, as a matter of fact, was exploited by Euclid. The assumptions from which mathematics starts are simple; the rest is not.

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as 'real' ... A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons, or an idea in the mind of God : each of these accounts of it may have its merits, but neither conforms at all closely to the suggestions of common sense. ... neither physicists nor philosophers have ever given any convincing account of what 'physical reality' is, or of how the physicist passes, from the confused mass of fact or sensation with which he starts, to the construction of the objects which he calls 'real'. A mathematician, on the other hand, is working with his own mathematical reality. ... mathematical objects are so much more what they seem. ... 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

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

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.

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.

The truth about Mathematics is that it is not always true.

To a scholar, mathematics is music.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

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

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.

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

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

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

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 wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

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

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

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

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.

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

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

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

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

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

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

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.

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur Mathematics is written for mathematicians De Revolutionibus

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.

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.

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.

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

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

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

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

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

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.