Mathematician Quotes - Page 11

• I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal.

  Brand Blanshard

  Science, Thinking, Discovery

  16 Copy quote

• Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

  Paul Halmos

  Math, Science, Errors

  "I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography". Book by Paul Halmos, 1985.

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.

  Carl Benjamin Boyer

  Math, Science, Culture

  30 Copy quote

• I think you can fan the flames, but I think in the same way that a mathematician is a mathematician - He's not taught to be a mathematician. He either has a feeling for equations and an understanding and delight in it, not only in the purity of it, but in its beauty as well.

  John Hurt

  Thinking, Flames, Feelings

  Source: www.avclub.com

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it's fun to try to learn some of the secrets.

  Paul Halmos

  God, Religious, Fun

  Paul Richard Halmos, John Ewing, F.W. Gehring (1991). “PAUL HALMOS Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics: Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics”, p.21, Springer Science & Business Media

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking.

  Cassius Jackson Keyser

  Art, Science, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

  Alan Turing

  Real, Needs, Machines

  B. E. Carpenter, Alan Mathison Turing, Michael Woodger (1986). “A.M. Turing's ACE report of 1946 and other papers”, The MIT Press

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• It has been a fortunate fact in the modern history of physical science that the scientist constructing a new theoretical system has nearly always found that the mathematics. . . required. . . had already been worked out by pure mathematicians for their own amusement. . . . The moral for statesmen would seem to be that, for proper scientific "planning", pure mathematics should be endowed fifty years ahead of scientists.

  R. B. Braithwaite

  Years, Amusement, Fifty

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Hate, Science, I Hate

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.

  Alfred Adler

  Teacher, Math, Science

  7 Copy quote

• 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”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  59 Copy quote

• The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

  Felix Klein

  Newton, Theory, Equal

  51 Copy quote

• A well-known mathematician once told me that the great thing about liking both math and sex was that he could do either one while thinking about the other.

  Steven Landsburg

  Sex, Math, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.

  Hermann Hankel

  Flower, Eye, Discovery

  8 Copy quote

• The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

  Richard Hamming

  Learning, Math, Numbers

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

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not...

  James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

  Work, Learning, Math

  "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science". "Nature", Vol. 42, (p. 467), 1890.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

  Francis Crick

  Strong, Reading, Math

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Doe, May

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.109, Hackett Publishing

  119 Copy quote

  Show source

• (Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Educational, Technology, Issues

  4 Copy quote