Mathematician Quotes - Page 2

• Hilbert once had a student in mathematics who stopped coming to his lectures, and he was finally told the young man had gone off to become a poet. Hilbert is reported to have remarked: 'I never thought he had enough imagination to be a mathematician.'

  George Polya

  Creativity, Men, Imagination

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• Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Science, Littles, Philosopher

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• Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Math, Principles, Lovers

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• You know we all became mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy.

  Maxwell Rosenlicht

  Math, Lazy, Laziness

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• A mathematician who can only generalise is like a monkey who can only climb up a tree, and a mathematician who can only specialise is like a monkey who can only climb down a tree. In fact neither the up monkey nor the down monkey is a viable creature. A real monkey must find food and escape his enemies and so must be able to incessantly climb up and down. A real mathematician must be able to generalise and specialise.

  George Polya

  Real, Math, Tree

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• One can always reason with reason.

  Henri Bergson

  Reason

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• The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

  Havelock Ellis

  Math, Science, Ladders

  havelock ellis (1923). “the dance of life”

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• There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

  Daniel Bernoulli

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

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• The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

  Clifford Geertz

  Mean, Thinking, Intuition

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• All these people that I used to know, they're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives.

  Bob Dylan

  People, Wife, Illusion

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• It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.

  Timothy Gowers

  Needs, Problem, Mathematics

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• Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

  Hermann Hesse

  Player, Glasses, Games

  Hermann Hesse (2002). “The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel”, p.33, Macmillan

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• ...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Numbers, Feelings

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• It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Men, Faults, Occupation

  "Gauss-Schumacher Briefwechsel". Book by Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1862.

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• Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads; ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant general the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

  Martin Gardner

  Queens, Kings, Teaching

  "Adventures Of a Mathematician" by Martin Gardner, www.nytimes.com. May 9, 1976.

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• Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Programming, Shoulders

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• Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Lying, Believe, Knowledge

  LEO TOLSTOY (1961). “ANNA KARENINA”

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• A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

  J. Willard Gibbs

  Truth, Science, Say Anything

  "On the Relation of Mathematics and Physics". "Scientific Monthly" 59, 456, December 1944.

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• How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

  W. H. Auden

  Happiness, Math, Science

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• The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another.

  Gosta Mittag-Leffler

  Dream, Art, Math

  "Mathematical Maxims and Minims". Book by Nicholas J. and John de Pillis Rose, 1988.

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• So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Math, Reputation, Sanctity

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 52, 1799.

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• Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Kings, Math, Today

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• A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

  Karl Weierstrass

  Math, Poet, Mathematics

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• Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Funny, Humorous, Math

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• The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.

  Saint Augustine

  Inspirational, Life, Education

  "Mathematics in Western Culture". Book by Morris Kline, 1953.

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