Mathematics Quotes
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I feel that what mathematics needs least are pundits who issue prescriptions or guidelines for presumably less enlightened mortals.
Armand Borel
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Though the structures and patterns of mathematics reflect the structure of, and resonate in, the human mind every bit as much as do the structures and patterns of music, human beings have developed no mathematical equivalent to a pair of ears. Mathematics can only be "seen" with the "eyes of the mind". It is as if we had no sense of hearing, so that only someone able to sight read music would be able to appreciate its patterns and harmonies.
Keith Devlin
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Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary and inevitable, but it is impossible to foresee their consequences. These have only been found out by long study, extending over many centuries. Much of our knowledge is due to a comparatively few great mathematicians such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, or Riemann; few careers can have been more satisfying than theirs. They have contributed something to human thought even more lasting than great literature, since it is independent of language.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
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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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Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful.
Martin Luther
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Mathematics is not a spectator sport!
George Polya
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Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.
Richard Feynman
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In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty years or so that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians agree: mathematics is the science of patterns.
Keith Devlin
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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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If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.
Ethan Canin
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I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.
Benjamin Moser
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Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
