Mathematician Quotes - Page 24

• I suppose the situation varies from field to field. If you're a mathematician, your proficiency in English may not be such a problem. If you're in the humanities or social sciences, there is no doubt that it is a handicap for you.

  Henry Rosovsky

  Humanity, Doubt, May

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Get Better, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician.

  Jerry Buss

  Careers, Wanted

  "The answer man". Interview with Steve Springer, www.espn.co.uk. March 24, 2010.

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• An old French mathematician said: "A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street." This clearness and ease of comprehension, here insisted on for a mathematical theory, I should still more demand for a mathematical problem if it is to be perfect; for what is clear and easily comprehended attracts, the complicated repels us.

  David Hilbert

  Men, Perfect, Ease

  "Mathematical Problems". Lecture delivered before the International Congress of Mathematicians at Paris, translated by Maby Winton Newson, mathcs.clarku.edu. 1900.

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• Mathematicians are proud of the fact that, generally, they do their work with a piece of chalk and a blackboard. They value hand-done proofs above all else. A big question in mathematics today is whether or not computational proofs are legitimate. Some mathematicians won't accept computational proofs and insist that a real proof must be done by the human hand and mind, using equations.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Real, Mind, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Life, Wings, Long

  James Joseph Sylvester (1870). “The Laws of Verse: Or Principles of Versification Exemplified in Metrical Translations, Together with an Annotated Reprint of the Inaugural Presidential Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Exeter”, p.122

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• ... a result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs.
  The Nature of Mathematics

  Max Black

  Accepted, Mathematics, Results

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• We are concerned, not with the development of just one capacity, such as that of a mathematician, or a scientist, or a musician, but with the total development of the student as a human
  being.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Musician, Development, Students

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (2005). “Life Ahead: On Learning and the Search for Meaning”, p.14, New World Library

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• So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Ignorance, Responsibility, Reality

  "Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure". Book by R. Buckminster Fuller, p. 234, "The Designers and the Politicians" (1962), 1969.

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• Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination.

  Leonard Koppett

  Imagination, Pace, Cliche

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• Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Years, Long, Males

  "Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists". www.nytimes.com. October 3, 2006.

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• Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Imagination, Nomenclature

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• To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.

  Ian Stewart

  Technology, Ideas, Simplicity

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• I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

  John Hurt

  School, Thinking, Talking

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, film.avclub.com. March 22, 2007.

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• Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, Cheerful, Matter

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• James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work.

  Simon Newcomb

  Might, Might Have Been, Has Beens

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Interesting, Today, Not Interested

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.232, Princeton University Press

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• Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

  Molly Antopol

  Writing, Empathy, Style

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• Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Law, Giving, Dollars

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• Among mathematicians in general, three main categories may be distinguished; and perhaps the names logicians, formalists, and intuitionists may serve to characterize them.

  Felix Klein

  Names, Three, May

  Felix Klein (1893). “The Evanston Colloquium: Lectures on Mathematics Delivered from Aug. 28 to Sept. 9, 1893 Before Members of the Congress of Mathematics Held in Connection with the World's Fair in Chicago at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill”

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• Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Personality, May, Mathematics

  Gian-Carlo Rota (2008). “Indiscrete Thoughts”, p.3, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

  Keith Devlin

  Zero, Roots, Numbers

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• Are not most professional mathematicians spared all trouble incident to income?

  Tobias Dantzig

  Income, Trouble, Incidents

  Tobias Dantzig (1954). “Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician”

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• The practical man demands an appearance of reality at least. Always dealing in the concrete, he regards mathematical terms not as symbols or thought but as images of reality. A system acceptable to the mathematician because of its inner consistency may appear to the practical man to be full of contradictions because of the incomplete manner in which it represents reality.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Reality, Men, Consistency

  Tobias Dantzig (1954). “Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician”

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• Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is - so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Animal, Men, Wisest Man

  Robert A. Heinlein (2007). “Glory Road”, p.277, Macmillan

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