Mathematics Quotes - Page 18

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

  Abraham Kaplan

  Vets, Coping, Mathematical

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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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• The heart of mathematics consists of concrete examples and concrete problems. Big general theories are usually afterthoughts based on small but profound insights; the insights themselves come from concrete special cases.

  Paul Halmos

  Heart, Profound, Special

  Paul Richard Halmos (1983). “Selecta: expository writing”, Springer Verlag

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• If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.

  Johannes Kepler

  Dream, Wall, Ignorance

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• "Do you know," the Devil confided, "not even the best mathematicians on other planets - all far ahead of yours - have solved it? Why, there is a chap on Saturn - he looks something like a mushroom on stilts - who solves partial differential equations mentally; and even he's given up."

  Arthur Porges

  Mushrooms, Devil, Saturn

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• So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Math, Reputation, Sanctity

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 52, 1799.

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• To parents who despair because their children are unable to master the first problems in arithmetic I can dedicate my examples. For, in arithmetic, until the seventh grade I was last or nearly last.

  Jacques Hadamard

  Children, Parent, Despair

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• No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."

  Pearl S. Buck

  Life, Real, Father

  Pearl S. Buck (2013). “The Goddess Abides: A Novel”, p.10, Open Road Media

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• The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

  Oswald Spengler

  Art, Math, Imagination

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1950). “Form and actuality”

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• The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

  Norbert Wiener

  Success, Math, Games

  "Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth". Book by Norbert Wiener, 1964.

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• . . . She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Math, Men, Easy

  Margaret Mitchell (1975). “Gone With the Wind”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Life, Math, Order

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Kay Ogden (1998). “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, p.98, Courier Corporation

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• There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Lying, Math, Science

  "The World of Mathematics". Book by J. R. Newman, 1956.

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• Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

  Joseph Conrad

  Moving, Giving, Imagination

  Joseph Conrad “The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad”, Library of Alexandria

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• I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Nature, Math, Talking

  James Joseph Sylvester (2008). “The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester”, p.72, American Mathematical Soc.

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• There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Math, Mind, Intellectual

  James Joseph Sylvester (1869). “Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association, Exeter, August 19th, 1869”, p.6

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• There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

  Gregory Benford

  Real, Math, Iron

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• Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Time, Science, Done

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• The Mathematics are Friends to Religion, inasmuch as they charm the Passions, restrain the Impetuosity of the Imagination, and purge the Mind from Error and Prejudice. Vice is Error, Confusion, and false Reasoning; and all Truth is more or less opposite to it. Besides, Mathematical Studies may serve for a pleasant Entertainment for those Hours which young Men are apt to throw away upon their Vices; the Delightfulness of them being such as to make Solitude not only easy, but desirable.

  John Arbuthnot

  Passion, Science, Men

  Martin Strong, John Arbuthnot (1745). “An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning: In a Letter from a Gentleman in the City, to His Friend at Oxford”, p.8

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• Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics.

  Edward Kasner

  Math, Paradox, 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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• Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm.

  Douglas Adams

  Food, Science, Law

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts Volume 2: The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential Phases”, p.45, Pan Macmillan

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• Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.

  Roger Bacon

  Learning, Ignorance, Science

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• Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.

  George Polya

  Science, Doe, Needs

  "Speaking of Science: Notable Quotes on Science, Engineering, and the Environment" by Jon Fripp, Michael Fripp, Deborah Fripp, Newnes (p. 45), 2000.

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• All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

  Roger Bacon

  People, Brain, Facts

  1267 OpusMajus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

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