Mathematician Quotes - Page 19

• Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

  Aristotle

  Doe, Needs, Use

  Aristotle (2016). “Physics”, p.82, Aristotle

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• In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Theoretical Physics, Frustrated, Way

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• Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.

  Paul Lockhart

  Thinking, Enjoy, Imaginary

  "A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form". Book by Paul Lockhart, 2009.

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• But as no two (theoreticians) agree on this (skin friction) or any other subject, some not agreeing today with what they wrote a year ago, I think we might put down all their results, add them together, and then divide by the number of mathematicians, and thus find the average coefficient of error. (1908)

  Hiram Maxim

  Science, Thinking, Errors

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• I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."

  Michael Loceff

  Opposites, People, Watches

  "The Worst Day Ever". Interview with James Surowiecki, www.slate.com. January 17, 2006.

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• That's my mathematician who examines problems which I put before him and checks their validity. You see, I am not myself a good mathematician.

  Albert Einstein

  Collaboration, Problem, Checks

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• Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Want, Limits

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• Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Men, Design, Elements

  Leonardo Da Vinci “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, Lulu.com

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• A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory.

  Paul Erdos

  Coffee, Cups, Mathematics

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• Even in the realm of things which do not claim actuality, and do not even claim possibility, there exist beyond dispute sets which are infinite.

  Bernard Bolzano

  Infinite, Possibility, Disputes

  Bernard Bolzano (2014). “Paradoxes of the Infinite (Routledge Revivals)”, p.84, Routledge

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• I have created a new universe from nothing.

  Janos Bolyai

  Universe

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• I work with a lot of mathematicians, and one thing I notice about them is that they are not particularly fast with numbers; in fact some of them are rather slow. This is not a bad thing; they are slow because they think deeply and carefully about mathematics.

  Jo Boaler

  Thinking, Numbers, Facts

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• What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

  Galileo Galilei

  Philosophy, Sky, Fields

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• In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

  Robert Musil

  Lying, Intellectual, Analogies

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.42, University of Chicago Press

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• Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Years, People, Mind

  "An Age-old Puzzle, Solved Modestly". articles.chicagotribune.com. July 5, 1993.

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• The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.

  Thomas Paine

  Wise, Men, Ideas

  The Rights of Man pt. 1 (1791)

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• Nobody listens to mathematicians.

  Carl Sagan

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.289, Ballantine Books

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• The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

  George Henry Lewes

  Wise, Moving, May

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

  George Eliot

  Men, Mad, Monsters

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.135

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• A pair of statements may be taken conjunctively or disjunctively; for example, "It lightens and it thunders ," is conjunctive, "It lightens or it thunders" is disjunctive. Each such individual act of connecting a pair of statements is a new monad for the mathematician .

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Taken, Example, May

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1982). “Writings of Charles S. Peirce: 1857-1866”, p.268, Indiana University Press

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• Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.

  John Forbes Nash

  Thinking, Vacation, Years

  "John F. Nash Jr. - Biographical". "Les Prix Nobel" ("The Nobel Prizes 1994") edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. 1995.

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• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

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• We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

  Thomas Reid

  Philosophy, Party, Issues

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• Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

  Larry Wall

  Boring, Perl, Values

  Usenet article <199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org>, 1997.

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• In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.

  William Stanley Jevons

  Writing, Wish, Mathematical

  William Stanley Jevons (1970). “The Theory of Political Economy”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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