If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy.
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.
The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Nature's great book is written in mathematics.
I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.
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.
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads; ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant general the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.
The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
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