Mathematics Quotes - Page 8

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

  Joel Spencer

  Character, Method, Mathematical

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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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• It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.

  John Wesley Young

  Math, Thinking, Students

  John Wesley Young, William Wells Denton, Ulysses Grant Mitchell (1930). “Lectures on fundamental concepts of algebra and geometry”

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• It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Science, Law, Interesting

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• Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity

  G. H. Hardy

  Appreciation, Math, Names

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• The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Math, Men, Lord

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• The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Teacher, Moving, Math

  "The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton". Book by Robert Perceval Graves, Volume 3, p. 219, 1889.

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• If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.

  Bernhard Riemann

  Easy, Enough, Proof

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• We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

  Mark Twain

  Math, Science, Eight

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.8549, Delphi Classics

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• It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Education, Math, Squares

  "A Budget of Paradoxes".

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• As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school.

  Cokie Roberts

  Prayer, School, Math

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• Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Mean, Science, Math

  Leonardo da Vinci (2008). “Notebooks”, p.10, OUP Oxford

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• In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.

  Tom Lehrer

  Success, Secret, Research

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• Mathematics is concerned with "all possible worlds."

  David Malet Armstrong

  World, Mathematics By Mathematicians, Concerned

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• Mathematics, however, is, as it were, its own explanation; this, although it may seem hard to accept, is nevertheless true, for the recognition that a fact is so is the cause upon which we base the proof.

  Gerolamo Cardano

  Causes, Facts, May

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• I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways."

  G. H. Hardy

  Lying, Two, Numbers

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• Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

  Maria Goeppert-Mayer

  Nature, Math, Men

  "A Course in Mathematical Methods for Physicists". Book by Russell L. Herman, p. 53, December 4, 2013.

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• Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
  [As opposed to the quotation: Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing].

  Henri Poincare

  Art, Math, Names

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• Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

  Lewis Carroll

  Math, Gaiety

  Lewis Carroll (1960). “The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll”, p.223, Courier Corporation

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• It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

  George Boole

  Essence, Ideas, Numbers

  George Boole (1854). “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities”, p.12

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• The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

  Richard Hamming

  Learning, Math, Numbers

  "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers". Book by Richard Hamming, 1962.

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• Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Nature, Math, Science

  "The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎". Book by Marcel Danesi (p. 71), 2004.

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• Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

  Norman Cousins

  Math, Two, Personality

  1979 In the Daily Telegraph, 17 Jul.

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• Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

  Albert Einstein

  Math, Noses, Wells

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• A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

  Karl Weierstrass

  Math, Poet, Mathematical

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