Mathematician Quotes - Page 10

• Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

  Yehuda Amichai

  Artist, Intelligent, Doctors

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• Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.

  Bill Gaede

  Atheist, Atheism, Mathematics

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• A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

  Bill Gaede

  Doe, Physics, Individual

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• A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.

  Bill Gaede

  Eye, Wave, Andromeda

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• Although I am even now still a layman in the area of mathematics, and although I lack theoretical knowledge, the mathematicians, and in particular the crystallographers, have had considerable influence on my work of the last twenty years. The laws of the phenomena around us--order, regularity, cyclical repetition, and renewals--have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

  M. C. Escher

  Beautiful, Years, Law

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• Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.

  George Polya

  Knowledge, Math, Obvious Things

  George Pólya (1968). “Mathematical discovery: on understanding, learning, and teaching problem solving”

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• What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

  G. H. Hardy

  Character, Science, Men

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.76, Cambridge University Press

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• It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

  G. H. Hardy

  Appreciation, Art, Writing

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

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• No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game

  G. H. Hardy

  Art, Men, Games

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.70, Cambridge University Press

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• We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

  Daniel Tammet

  Philosophical, Names, Ideas

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• Oh these mathematicians make me tired! When you ask them to work out a sum they take a piece of paper, cover it with rows of A's, B's, and X's and Y's ... scatter a mess of flyspecks over them, and then give you an answer that's all wrong!

  Thomas A. Edison

  Tired, Science, Giving

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• The inner circle of pure mathematicians will respond to the book with delight.

  Philip J. Davis

  Book, Circles, Delight

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• Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

  Charles Kingsley

  Science, Men, Thinking

  Charles Kingsley (2008). “Scientific Lectures and Essays”, p.93, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Math, Judging, Decision

  Tobias Dantzig (2005). “Number: The Language of Science”, Dutton Juvenile

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• The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.

  G. H. Hardy

  Science, Reality, Common Sense

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• The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Writing, Greek, Sacred

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• Euler - The unsurpassed master of analytic invention.

  Richard Courant

  Invention, Masters, Analytics

  Richard Courant (1948). “Lectures on the theory of functions”

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• Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

  Morris Kline

  Education, Knowledge, Math

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.408, Oxford University Press

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• The mathematical giant [Gauss], who from his lofty heights embraces in one view the stars and the abysses.

  Farkas Bolyai

  Stars, Science, Views

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• One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Hate, Law, Knowing

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• An axiomatic system establishes a reverberating relationship between what a mathematician assumes (the axioms) and what he or she can derive (the theorems). In the best of circumstances, the relationship is clear enough so that the mathematician can submit his or her reasoning to an informal checklist, passing from step to step with the easy confidence the steps are small enough so that he cannot be embarrassed nor she tripped up.

  David Berlinski

  Steps, Assuming, Enough

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• I have also known some of the world's finest brains and some of these, though passionately fond of chess, have been pretty poor players. I used to know one of the world's leading mathematicians and whenever we played chess I had to give him the odds of a Queen to make matters more equal, and even then I always won.

  Harry Golombek

  Success, Queens, Player

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• Mathematics may be likened to a large rock whose interior composition we wish to examine. The older mathematicians appear as persevering stone cutters slowly attempting to demolish the rock from the outside with hammer and chisel. The later mathematicians resemble expert miners who seek vulnerable veins, drill into these strategic places, and then blast the rock apart with well placed internal charges.

  Howard Whitley Eves

  Math, Rocks, Wish

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• The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.

  Freeman Dyson

  Math, Bridges, Design

  "Freeman Dyson: Mathematician, Physicist, and Writer". The College Mathematics Journal Interview with Donald J. Albers, January 1994.

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• It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Reading, Science, Light

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