Mathematics Quotes - Page 7

• If you had done something twice, you are likely to do it again.

  Brian Kernighan

  Done, Mathematical, Ifs

  Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike (1984). “The UNIX Programming Environment”, Prentice Hall

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• In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it.

  Roger Bacon

  Math, Men, Intellectual

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• If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.

  Richard Askey

  Nice, Reason Why, Fortune

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• The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.

  Aristotle

  Math, Principles, Firsts

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• A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Math, Mediocrity, Paper

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

  Georg Cantor

  "Infinity and the Mind". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1982.

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• The fact is there are few more popular subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune.

  G. H. Hardy

  Appreciation, Math, People

  G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.86, Cambridge University Press

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• At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Brother, First Love

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Autobiography”, p.25, Routledge

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• There is something in statistics that makes it very similar to astrology.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Astrology, Statistics, Mathematical

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• The very term 'combinatorial methods' has an oxymoronic character.

  Joel Spencer

  Character, Method, Mathematical

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• It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Graphic Design, Immortality, Mark

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

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• Everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere in the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak.

  Donald J. Newman

  Shining, Mountain, Path

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• Combinatorial analysis, in the trivial sense of manipulating binomial and multinomial coefficients, and formally expanding powers of infinite series by applications ad libitum and ad nauseamque of the multinomial theorem, represented the best that academic mathematics could do in the Germany of the late 18th century.

  Richard Askey

  Science, Germany, Analysis

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• Music is part of Number Theory. Nowadays when a number-theorist applies for a grant, he says that it is good for security, but in those days, way before America, he would say that it's good for music. I will not comment whether we have progressed.

  Hendrik Lenstra

  Numbers, America, Way

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• MacPherson told me that my theorem can be viewed as blah blah blah Grothendieck blah blah blah, which makes it much more respectable.

  Jim Propp

  Blah, Mathematical, Respectable

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• Nature's great book is written in mathematics.

  Galileo Galilei

  Book, Math, Science

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• The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.

  Eric Bell

  Moving, Math, Cowboy

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• When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.

  Brian Greene

  Giving, Physics, Mathematical

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• Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Math, Race, Apes

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• When I entered graduate school I had carried out the instructions given to me by my father and had knocked on both Murray Gell-Mann's and Feynman's doors and asked them what they were currently doing. Murray wrote down the partition function for the three-dimensional Ising model and said it would be nice if I could solve it (at least that is how I remember the conversation). Feynman's answer was 'nothing'.

  Kenneth G. Wilson

  Father, Nice, School

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• To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciences is to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls.

  Pafnuty Chebyshev

  Math, Demand, Cows

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• With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Philosophical, Math, Mountain

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• If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

  George Santayana

  Art, Mathematical, Math And Science

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• The principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible.

  George Polya

  Knowledge, Math, Principles

  George Pólya (1948). “How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method”

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• In order to solve this differential equation you look at it until a solution occurs to you.

  George Polya

  Math, Order, Looks

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