Mathematical Quotes - Page 10

• Order is heaven's first law.

  Alexander Pope

  Happiness, Math, Order

  1733 An Essay on Man, epistle to 4, l.49.

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• Let no one say that I have said nothing new... the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Play, Tennis

  Blaise Pascal (2007). “Thoughts”, p.14, Cosimo, Inc.

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• My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

  Tom Stoppard

  Beautiful, Truth, Work

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• He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Love, Math, Reality

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• Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Wisdom, Math, Science

  "The Organization of Thought" (1917)

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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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• 

  A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Beauty, Spiritual

  Letter of 1950, as quoted in "The New York Times", March 29, 1972.

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• Know what you are talking about.

  Pope John Paul II

  Knowledge, Knowing Jesus, Talking

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• If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  David Hume

  School, Math, Numbers

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)

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• When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

  Lewis Carroll

  Mean, Different, Wonderland

  1871 Through the Looking-Glass, ch.6,'Humpty Dumpty'.

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• Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

  Blaise Pascal

  Humility, Pride, Math

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• Einstein's relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists.

  Nikola Tesla

  Kings, Ignorance, Men

  The New York Times, (p. 23, c.8), July 11, 1935.

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• Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Creativity, Science, Simplicity

  The Concept of Nature ch. 7 (1920)

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• The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings, and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to senses tried by the present day kaleidoscope of events.

  Morris Kline

  Teaching, Math, Challenges

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.470, Oxford University Press

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• In order to translate a sentence from English into French two things are necessary. First, we must understand thoroughly the English sentence. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of expression peculiar to the French language. The situation is very similar when we attempt to express in mathematical symbols a condition proposed in words. First, we must understand thoroughly the condition. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of mathematical expression.

  George Polya

  Expression, Order, Two

  George Pólya (1957). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mean, Science, Mathematical Logic

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”, p.626, Psychology Press

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• Our notion of symmetry is derived form the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only, not vertically nor in depth.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Depth, Demand

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• Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied... For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

  G. H. Hardy

  Sensual, Technique, Taught

  "A Mathematician's Apology". Book by G. H. Hardy, 1941.

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• Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Father, Math, Long

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• You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.

  Hermann Hesse

  Reality, Law, Yesterday

  Hermann Hesse (2002). “The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel”, p.168, Macmillan

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• One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else. We have a natural opportunity to investigate the connections of a problem when looking back at its solution.

  George Polya

  Teacher, Science, Opportunity

  George Pólya (1948). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Math, Interesting, Important

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• Another advantage of a mathematical statement is that it is so definite that it might be definitely wrong; and if it is found to be wrong, there is a plenteous choice of amendments ready in the mathematicians' stock of formulae. Some verbal statements have not this merit; they are so vague that they could hardly be wrong, and are correspondingly useless.

  Lewis Fry Richardson

  Math, Choices, Merit

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• The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures.

  James Jeans

  Nature, Science, Facts

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• It is possible for a mathematician to be "too strong" for a given occasion. He forces through, where another might be driven to a different, and possible more fruitful, approach. (So a rock climber might force a dreadful crack, instead of finding a subtle and delicate route.)

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Strong, Rocks, Different

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.144, Cambridge University Press

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