Mathematics Quotes - Page 17

• Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

  Benjamin Peirce

  Math, Science, Definitions

  "Linear Associative Algebra" (1870)

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• Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Children, Forever, Understanding

  Le Petit Prince ch. 1 (1943)

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• Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Philosophy, Sensual

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• He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Love, Math, Reality

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• I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

  Andrew Wiles

  Love, Childhood, England

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

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• In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

  Steve Wozniak

  Genius, Economy, Yeah

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• If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  David Hume

  School, Math, Numbers

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)

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• From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Music, Education, Children

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  School, Knowledge, Suggestions

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• Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

  Tom Robbins

  Science, Animal, Past

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Another Roadside Attraction”, p.127, Bantam

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• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Truth, Science

  Philosophical Essays (1910) no. 4

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• The world is anxious to admire that apex and culmination of modern mathematics: a theorem so perfectly general that no particular application of it is feasible.

  George Polya

  Science, Anxiety, World

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• The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Exercise, Science, Mind

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.362, Princeton University Press

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• In order to translate a sentence from English into French two things are necessary. First, we must understand thoroughly the English sentence. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of expression peculiar to the French language. The situation is very similar when we attempt to express in mathematical symbols a condition proposed in words. First, we must understand thoroughly the condition. Second, we must be familiar with the forms of mathematical expression.

  George Polya

  Expression, Order, Two

  George Pólya (1957). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.

  G. H. Hardy

  Degrees, Economy, Mathematical

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.113, Cambridge University Press

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• I think it is said that Gauss had ten different proofs for the law of quadratic reciprocity. Any good theorem should have several proofs, the more the better. For two reasons: usually, different proofs have different strengths and weaknesses, and they generalise in different directions - they are not just repetitions of each other.

  Michael Atiyah

  Thinking, Should Have, Law

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• This therefore is Mathematics: She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul; She gives life to her own discoveries; She awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; She brings light to our intrinsic ideas; She abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth.

  Proclus

  Life, Ignorance, Science

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• Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Knowledge, Math, Science

  Eric Temple Bell (1938). “The queen of the sciences”

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• The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

  David Hilbert

  Art, Math, Special

  "Hilbert". Book by Constance Reid, 1970.

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• I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Taken, School, Thinking

  Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.158, Prometheus Books

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• Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

  Rene Descartes

  Powerful, Knowledge, Math

  RENE DESCARTES (1952). “RULES FOR THE DIRECTION OF THE MIND DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE MEDITATIONS AND REPLIES THE GEOMETRY”

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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, Theory

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• The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Math, Development, May

  Science and the ModernWorld ch. 2 (1925)

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• Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.

  Abraham Kaplan

  Vets, Coping, Mathematical

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• [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

  Henry Adams

  Musician, Mathematician, Bores

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