Mathematics Quotes
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I firmly believe that mathematics does not exist outside of humans. It is something we, as a species, invent.
Keith Devlin
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You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.
Steve Jobs
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Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.
David Mumford
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Mathematics is, in many ways, the most precious response that the human spirit has made to the call of the infinite.
Cassius Jackson Keyser
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There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
Nikolai Lobachevsky
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I always smile when I hear that women cannot excel in mathematics.
Evelyn Boyd Granville
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Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.
Eric Temple Bell
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I will also talk about my experience of growing up in the former Soviet Union, where mathematics became an outpost of freedom in the face of an oppressive regime. I was denied entrance to Moscow State University because of the discriminatory policies of the Soviet Union. The doors were slammed shut in front of me. I was an outcast. But I didn’t give up. I would sneak into the University to attend lectures and seminars. I would read math books on my own, sometimes late at night. And in the end, I was able to hack the system. They didn’t let me in through the front door; I flew in through a window. When you are in love, who can stop you?
Edward Frenkel
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I'm a biologist, so... Which I think should be mandatory. Biology should be mandatory. Mathematics? They say we don't know enough about math and science. Well we don't know enough about science and particularly biology, which is such a huge field.
Gregory Walter Graffin
Bad Religion
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We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.
Nick Lampson
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My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn't help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn't make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That's one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye - once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.
David Papineau
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Beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort.
George Polya
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Mathematics may, be briefly defined as the science of quantities, and is one of the most important of disciplining studies which engage the practical student.
Rufus Choate
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Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.
Carl Linnaeus
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Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.
William Thurston
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As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.
Blaise Pascal
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Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
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I assert that, in any particular natural science, one encounters genuine scientific substance only to the extent that mathematics is present.
Immanuel Kant
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It seems perfectly clear that Economy, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science. There exists much prejudice against attempts to introduce the methods and language of mathematics into any branch of the moral sciences. Most persons appear to hold that the physical sciences form the proper sphere of mathematical method, and that the moral sciences demand some other method-I know not what.
William Stanley Jevons
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How then shall mathematical concepts be judged? They shall not be judged. Mathematics is the supreme arbiter. From its decisions there is no appeal. We cannot change the rules of the game, we cannot ascertain whether the game is fair. We can only study the player at his game; not, however, with the detached attitude of a bystander, for we are watching our own minds at play.
David van Dantzig
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The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated.
Edward Kasner
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Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
Arthur Schopenhauer
