Mathematics Quotes
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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.
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Numbers are the most certain things we have.
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The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
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The mathematics of high achievement.
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[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.
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I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.
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In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.
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Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.
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The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results.
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When, therefore, I had long considered this uncertainty of traditional mathematics, it began to weary me that no more definite explanation of the movement of the world-machine established in our behalf by the best and most systematic builder of all, existed among the philosophers who had studied so exactly in other respects the minutest details in regard to the sphere.
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The word algorithm comes from the name of Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of a ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī’s work: a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.
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Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.
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While, on the one hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. These ultimate laws-in the domain of physical science at least-will be the dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ultimate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathematics.
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Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.
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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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Beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort.
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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.
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Mathematics and art are quite different. We could not publish so many papers that used, repeatedly, the same idea and still command the respect of our colleagues.
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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?
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The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.
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A Noah's Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, 'Almost All Children Left Behind.'
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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.
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The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.
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Mathematics is as old as Man.
