Great Math Quotes

• I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

  Lord Byron

  Math, Two, Giving

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• Nature's great book is written in mathematics.

  Galileo Galilei

  Book, Math, Science

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• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Math, Perfection

  "The Study of Mathematics" (1902)

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• If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy.

  Alfred Renyi

  Happiness, Math, Unhappy

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• There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent.

  Raoul Bott

  Math, Two, Way

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• Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful.
  If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful.
  If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.

  Paul Erdos

  Beautiful, Education, Math

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• The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

  Richard Hamming

  Learning, Math, Numbers

  "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers". Book by Richard Hamming, 1962.

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• The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.

  Paul Halmos

  Learning, Math, Way

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• We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Jobs, Writing, Math

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• I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

  Paul Erdos

  Beautiful, Math, Numbers

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• Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Albert Einstein, Stephen W. Hawking (2007). “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein”, p.337, Running Press

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• Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

  Peter Marshall

  Love, Motivational, Family

  Peter Marshall (1949). “Prayers Offered by the Chaplain, the Rev. Peter Marshall, D.D.: At the Opening of the Daily Sessions of the Senate of the United States During the Eightieth and Eighty-first Congress 1947-1949”

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• Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

  Albert Einstein

  Motivational, Education, Freedom

  Albert Einstein (1970). “Out of my later years”, Greenwood Pub Group

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• The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

  Aristotle

  Beautiful, Education, Math

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• If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

  John von Neumann

  Believe, Math, Simple

  John von Neumann's remarks as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery (1947) as quoted in "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945-1947" by Franz L. Alt, Communications of the ACM, Volume 15, Issue 7, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery (p. 694), July 1972.

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• The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Stars, Disappointment, Father

  "An Introduction to Mathematics" by Alfred North Whitehead, Ch. 1, 1911.

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• The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

  Bertrand Russell

  Honesty, Math, Toil

  Bertrand Russell (2007). “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, p.71, Spokesman Books

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• How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world?

  John Tillotson

  Education, Book, Fall

  John Tillotson (1714). “The works of the most reverend Dr. John Tillotson, late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: containing fifty four sermons and discourses on several occasions. Together with The Rule of Faith. Being all that were published by His Grace himself and now collected into one volume, to which is added an alphabetical table of the principle matter”, p.15

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• In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.

  G. H. Hardy

  Degrees, Economy, Mathematics

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.113, Cambridge University Press

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• At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Brother, First Love

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Autobiography”, p.25, Routledge

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• There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Lying, Math, Science

  "The World of Mathematics". Book by J. R. Newman, 1956.

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• A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

  John Henry Newman

  Memories, Math, Mind

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• The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the application of physical truth in the broadest sense of the word.

  William Fogg Osgood

  Truth, Math, Statistics

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• Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics.

  Edward Kasner

  Math, Paradox, Mathematics

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• It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Education, Appreciation, Mean

  "Return to Mathematical Circles". Book by Howard Eves, 1988.

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