Mathematics Quotes
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The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission.
Carl Eckart
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The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.
Eugene Wigner
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I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.
Carl Gustav Hempel
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Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
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In mathematics I can report no deficiency, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of Pure Mathematics.
Francis Bacon
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Many of the proofs in mathematics are very long and intricate. Others, though not long, are very ingeniously constructed.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
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I am ever more intrigued by the correspondence between mathematics and physical facts. The adaptability of mathematics to the description of physical phenomena is uncanny.
Nicolaas Bloembergen
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What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.
David Eugene Smith
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Mathematics is universal. It's discovered by human beings, but the rules of mathematics are the same throughout the universe and the laws of the universe.
Paul Davies
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Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.
Paul Erdos
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On all levels primary, and secondary and undergraduate - mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to the real world. To students, mathematics appears to deal almost entirely with things whlch are of no concern at all to man.
Morris Kline
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Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.
Eric Temple Bell
