Best 69 quotes in «mathematician quotes» category

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

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.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

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

[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.

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

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.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

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.

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.

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

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Few rounds.... I am damn good mathematician! 2 999 999 999 999 999 999 + 11 999 999 999 999 999 999 = 14 999 999 999 999 999 998.

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.

If there is anything like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective.

God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

I spoke of the 'real' mathematics of Fermat and other great mathematicians, the mathematics which has permanent aesthetic value, as for example the best Greek mathematics has, the mathematics which is eternal because the best of it may, like the best literature, continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years. These men were all primarily pure mathematicians; but I was not thinking only of pure mathematics. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among 'real' mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are, at present at any rate, almost as 'useless' as the theory of numbers. It is the dull and elementary parts of applied mathematics, as it is the dull and elementary parts of pure mathematics, that work for good or ill.

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.

I think you mother has Asperger's," Georgie had said to Neal. "They didn't get Asperger's int he '50s." "I'm just saying maybe she's on the the spectrum." "She's just a math teacher.

It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms. The relationship of these presumptions is left in the dark; one sees neither whether and in how far their connection is necessary, nor a priori whether it is possible. From Euclid to Legendre, to name the most renowned of modern writers on geometry, this darkness has been lifted neither by the mathematicians nor the philosophers who have laboured upon it.

Mathematics is not just a subject of education system, it is the soul of education system.

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.