Mathematician Quotes - Page 20

• 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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• Work/Loaf Ratio”...I have spent fourteen years perfecting... I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of the “W/LR” save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos.

  Gary Reilly

  Years, Bores You, Long

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• As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Writing, Math

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• Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

  John Banville

  Math, Null, Mixtures

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• The constructs of the mathematical mind are at the same time free and necessary. The individual mathematician feels free to define his notions and set up his axioms as he pleases. But the question is will he get his fellow mathematician interested in the constructs of his imagination. We cannot help the feeling that certain mathematical structures which have evolved through the combined efforts of the mathematical community bear the stamp of a necessity not affected by the accidents of their historical birth.

  Hermann Weyl

  Math, Imagination, Effort

  Hermann Weyl (1968). “Gesammelte Abhandlungen”

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• Intuition is a combination of insight and imagination that was once attributed to spiritual communication. Mathematicians call it 'fuzzy logic,' drawing conclusions from vague or subjective input. The mind becomes aware without the direct intervention of reasoning. Once you can imagine something you can begin the process of creating it. Executives use intuition to make many product, investment, and hiring decisions, even if they deny it. Success in business may depend on an accurate gut.

  Jennifer James

  Spiritual, Business, Communication

  Jennifer James (2012). “Thinking In The Future Tense”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.

  Blaise Pascal

  Men, Practice, Judging

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• No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

  Storm Jameson

  Art, Communication, Musician

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Parthian Words”, p.88, A&C Black

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• This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

  Albert Einstein

  Income, World, Philosopher

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• Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

  Robert M. Hutchins

  Thinking, Intellectual, Technique

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• There's nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right to your face.

  Marjorie Benton Cooke

  Lying, Data, Faces

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• Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Thinking, Play, America

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.24, New World Library

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• When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

  Mark Haddon

  Becoming, Literature, Devouring

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