Mathematician Quotes - Page 14

• Oh yes, children often commit murders. And quite clever ones, too. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to make great names for themselves, start amazingly early.... Like mathematicians and musicians. Poets develop later.

  John Lee Mahin

  Children, Clever, Names

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• To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy.

  Frederick The Great

  Eye, Math, Half

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• The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

  Karl Pearson

  Math, May, Results

  Karl Pearson (1900). “The grammar of science”, p.505, Рипол Классик

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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 product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new.

  William Thurston

  Math, Ideas, Community

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• The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

  Alexander Grothendieck

  Math, Understanding, Would Be

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• Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

  Andrew Wiles

  Four, Want, Infinity

  "Andrew Wiles on Solving Fermat". www.pbs.org. November 1, 2000.

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• It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.

  Aristotle

  Mind, Demand, Accepting

  Aristotle (1996). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.5, Wordsworth Editions

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• There is a famous formula, perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas - developed by Euler from a discovery of de Moivre: e^(i pi) + 1 = 0... It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician.

  Edward Kasner

  Education, Discovery, Philosopher

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• I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.

  M. C. Escher

  Education, Book, Math

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• You ought to have seen Frédéric with his monocle, his greying whiskers, his calm demeanour, carving his plump quack-quack, trussed and already flamed, throwing it into the pan, preparing the sauce, salting and peppering like Claude Monet's paintings, with the seriousness of a judge and the precision of a mathematician, and opening up, with a sure hand, in advance, every perspective of taste.

  Leon Daudet

  Opening Up, Ducks, Hands

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• It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

  Aristotle

  Science, Demand, Logic

  Aristotle (2009). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.4, OUP Oxford

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• It really is worth the trouble to invent a new symbol if we can thus remove not a few logical difficulties and ensure the rigour of the proofs. But many mathematicians seem to have so little feeling for logical purity and accuracy that they will use a word to mean three or four different things, sooner than make the frightful decision to invent a new word.

  Gottlob Frege

  Mean, Science, Decision

  Gottlob Frege (1952). “Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege”

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• Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass.

  Michio Kaku

  Children, Book, Glasses

  Michio Kaku (1999). “Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century”, p.340, Oxford Paperbacks

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• But what exceeds all wonders, I have discovered four new planets and observed their proper and particular motions, different among themselves and from the motions of all the other stars; and these new planets move about another very large star [Jupiter] like Venus and Mercury, and perchance the other known planets, move about the Sun. As soon as this tract, which I shall send to all the philosophers and mathematicians as an announcement, is finished, I shall send a copy to the Most Serene Grand Duke, together with an excellent spyglass, so that he can verify all these truths.

  Galileo Galilei

  Stars, Moving, Science

  "Sidereus Nuncius, Or The Sidereal Messenger". Book by Galileo Galilei, March 13, 1610.

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• They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why.

  Robin Wasserman

  Life, Lying, Pages

  Robin Wasserman (2012). “The Book of Blood and Shadow”, p.325, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.

  Tom Lehrer

  Science, May, Way

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• There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Hair, Balls

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• How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Luxury, People, Simplicity

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.347, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The most spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.

  Paul Halmos

  Memories, Science, Thinking

  "PAUL HALMOS Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics: Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics".

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• I don't care if you are a good mathematician, or a good athletic, or not good at anything- that you think. But I'm gonna come and tell you that you're awesome the way you are.

  Nick Vujicic

  Thinking, Athletic, Care

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I never got a pass mark in math... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books. Funny me consorting with all these learned folks, as though I were their long lost brother. I guess they are unaware of the fact that I am ignorant about the whole thing.

  M. C. Escher

  Beauty, Art, Brother

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• If a man is in any sense a real mathematician, then it is a hundred to one that his mathematics will be far better than anything else he can do, and that he would be silly if he surrendered any decent opportunity of exercising his one talent in order to do undistinguished work in other fields. Such a sacrifice could be justified only by economic necessity of age.

  G. H. Hardy

  Real, Silly, Sacrifice

  "A Mathematician's Apology".

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• Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.

  Richard Hamming

  Toes, Computer, Scientist

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• I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Country, Book, Offering

  A World Split Apart, delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University

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