Mathematician Quotes - Page 25

• 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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• I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.

  Tom Lehrer

  Teaching, Mean, Fighting

  "Song: "Lobachevsky"("Songs by Tom Lehrer")". 1953.

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• I'm a mathematician because I'm too slow to be a writer.

  Jack Edmonds

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• Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

  Jack Edmonds

  Fun, Mathematics, Ifs

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• Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!

  Mark Mason

  Reading, Engineering, Land

  "Career Spotlight: What I Do as a Land Surveyor". Interview with Andy Orin, lifehacker.com. December 10, 2015.

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• I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee.

  Fred Hoyle

  Sorry, Memories, Wrath

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• No mathematician of equal stature has risen from our generation... Hilbert was singularly free from national and racial prejudices; in all public questions, be they political, social or spiritual, he stood forever on the side of freedom.

  Hermann Weyl

  Spiritual, Our Generation, Forever

  Hermann Weyl (2013). “Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy”, p.93, Courier Corporation

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• ...the mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence.

  Hans Reichenbach

  Together, Use, Definitions

  Hans Reichenbach (1958). “Philosophie Der Raum-Zeit-Lehre”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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• 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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• Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

  Alan Turing

  Science, Religion, Boundaries

  Epigram to Robin Gandy, 1954. "Alan Turing: The Enigma". Book by Andrew Hodges, p. 513, 1992.

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• Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

  G. H. Hardy

  Real, Science, Understanding

  G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.81, Cambridge University Press

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• This Excellent Mathematician having given us, in the Transactions of February last, an account of the cause, which induced him to think upon Reflecting Telescopes, instead of Refracting ones, hath thereupon presented the curious world with an Essay of what may be performed by such Telescopes; by which it is found, that Telescopical Tubes may be considerably shortened without prejudice to their magnifiying effect. On his invention of the catadioptrical telescope, as he communicated to the Royal Society.

  Isaac Newton

  Science, Thinking, World

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• Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Art, Math, Emotional

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• Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means. The geometer might be replaced by the "logic piano" imagined by Stanley Jevons; or, if you choose, a machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

  Henri Poincare

  Mean, Math, Piano

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• It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Thinking, Law

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• I began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy.

  Paul Laffoley

  Mean, Reality, Views

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• A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

  G. H. Hardy

  Math, Patterns, Original Ideas

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.84, Cambridge University Press

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• Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.

  Abraham Flexner

  Dark, Looks, Cows

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• I suppose that every age has its own particular fantasy: ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us, it is the other way `round

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Men, Age, Way

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• I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.

  Jordan Ellenberg

  Teacher, School, Kids

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• The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.

  John von Neumann

  Thinking, Depth, Mathematics

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• I've approached music with the understanding that knowledge is available regarding tones and their effect upon the body. I think the father of that knowledge was the mathematician Pythagoras who lived several thousand years ago. Pythagoras was also a fine musician and he knew specifically what tones would affect which parts of the body.

  Paul Horn

  Father, Thinking, Years

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