Math Quotes - Page 10

• Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems.

  Carl Pomerance

  Fun, Science, Problem

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• [A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.

  Evan Esar

  Simple, Circles, Scientist

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• In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.

  Albert Einstein

  God, Mean, Science

  Albert Einstein, Stephen W. Hawking (2007). “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein”, p.346, Running Press

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• Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

  G. H. Hardy

  Love, Sacrifice, Player

  G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.94, Cambridge University Press

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• The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.

  Galileo Galilei

  Circles, Law, Triangles

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• Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Leave the dude alone and he'll figure it out.

  Louis C. K.

  Education, Men, Fishing

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• I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations.

  G. H. Hardy

  Lying, Believe, Science

  G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.123, Cambridge University Press

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• The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

  David Hilbert

  Art, Special, Statistics

  "Hilbert". Book by Constance Reid, 1970.

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• We are justified in calling numbers a free creation of the human mind.

  Richard Dedekind

  Numbers, Mind, Creation

  "Essays on the Theory of Numbers".

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• The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Men, Lord, Made

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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, Toil, Want

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

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• Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

  Francis Bacon

  Wise, Witty, Philosophy

  'Essays' (1625) 'Of Studies'

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• Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

  Blaise Pascal

  Ordinary Extraordinary, Intelligence, Mind

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• Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

  Bertrand Russell

  Conformity, Regions, Absolutes

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• Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

  Paul Dirac

  Power, Tools, Limits

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.457, Cambridge University Press

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• The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Life, Education, Important

  The Reader's Digest, Vol. 140, p. 194, 1992.

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• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

  B. F. Skinner

  Graduation, Education, Teacher

  New Scientist 21 May 1964

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• Before beginning [to try to prove Fermat's Last Theorem] I should have to put in three years of intensive study, and I haven't that much time to squander on a probable failure.

  David Hilbert

  Time, Should Have, Years

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• Teaching is the royal road to learning.

  Jessamyn West

  Education, Teaching, Learning

  Jessamyn West (1979). “The life I really lived: a novel”, Harcourt

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• We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

  Mark Twain

  Science, Eight, Years

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.8549, Delphi Classics

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• Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

  Walt Whitman

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  "Song of Myself " l. 1324 (written 1855)

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• Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons.

  Pythagoras

  Ideas, Pythagorean Theorem, Numbers

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• Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

  Maria Goeppert-Mayer

  Nature, Men, Mind

  "A Course in Mathematical Methods for Physicists". Book by Russell L. Herman, p. 53, December 4, 2013.

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• Somebody came up to me after a talk I had given, and say, "You make mathematics seem like fun." I was inspired to reply, "If it isn't fun, why do it?"

  Ralph P. Boas, Jr.

  Fun, Teaching, Inspired

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