Mathematician Quotes

• The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight.

  

  George Dantzig
  • Creatures
  • Designer
  • Compared

• A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory.

  

  Paul Erdos
  • Coffee
  • Turns
  • Mathematician

• A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.

  

  Stefan Banach
  • Persons
  • Theory
  • Proof

• The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Truth
  • Man
  • Mathematician

• I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.

  

  Brand Blanshard
  • Gods
  • Surrender
  • Nonsense

• I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Mathematician

• Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, he said: I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.

  

  Edmund Landau
  • Woman
  • Swear
  • Testimony

• The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

  

  William James
  • Passion
  • Poet
  • Math

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

  

  Brahmagupta
  • Year
  • Solve
  • Mathematician

• A mathematician is a scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.

  

  Evan Esar
  • Scientist
  • Circle
  • Mathematician

• I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate.

  

  David Mumford
  • People
  • Pride
  • Math

• 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.

  

  Bill Gosper
  • Stories
  • Mathematician

• A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

  

  Bill Gaede
  • Individual
  • Experiments
  • Abstract

• The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

  

  Keith Devlin
  • People
  • Brain
  • Human

• The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof; but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by guessing.

  

  George Polya
  • Result
  • Proof
  • Mathematician

• Even though I am a mathematician, I look at fetal development with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us?

  

  Alexander Tsiaras
  • Development
  • Mathematician
  • Fetal

• The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

  

  Ernst Mach
  • Feeling
  • Intelligence
  • Mathematician

• The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

  

  George Bernard Shaw
  • Beauty
  • Fascinated
  • Mathematician

• Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague as I most always did, when I was attacked by an illness never before experienced, which manifested itself in chilliness and painful weariness of the whole body. In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid's Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me. The ingenuity displayed in Euclid's presentation filled me with such vivid pleasure, that forthwith I felt as well as ever.

  

  Bernard Bolzano
  • Pleasure
  • Vacation
  • Experienced

• As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.

  

  William Stanley Jevons
  • Long
  • Ideas
  • Facts

• It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.

  

  Augustus De Morgan
  • Circle
  • Mathematician
  • Seem

• I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Interesting
  • Mathematician

• Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.

  

  Tom Lehrer
  • Wonder
  • Mathematician

• Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

  

  Stefan Banach
  • Mathematician
  • Analogies

1

2

3

previous

next