Math famous quotes
05-21-2025
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But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two.
-- A. A. Milne -
The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
-- A. N. Wilson -
Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?
-- Abraham Verghese -
I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.
-- Alan Shepard -
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
-- Albert Einstein -
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
-- Albert Einstein -
The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
-- Albert Einstein -
Geometry is the foundation of all painting.
-- Albrecht Durer -
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
-- Aldous Huxley -
"The most powerful single idea in mathematics is the notion of a variable."
-- Alexander Dewdney -
I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself.
-- Alexander Grothendieck -
The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.
-- Alexander Grothendieck -
One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.
-- Alexandre Dumas -
The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.
-- Alonzo Church -
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
-- Anatole France -
God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.
-- Andre Weil -
I don't believe we're hateful. I think mostly we're just asleep, but the math adds up the same.
-- Andrea Gibson -
I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.
-- Andrew Shue -
We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
-- Andrew Wiles -
My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.
-- Ann Druyan -
A valuable lesson I've learned from making music is to never let anyone intimidate me. Every student, celebrity, CEO and math teacher in the world has experienced love, loneliness, fear and embarassment at some point. To understand this is to level an often very lopsided playing field.
-- Anna Nalick -
I loved math. I was such a nerd! I really enjoyed working through problems and finding the solution.
-- AnnaLynne McCord -
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
-- Anton Chekhov -
Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.
-- Antony Garrett Lisi -
I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.
-- Archimedes -
There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.
-- Aristotle -
As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.
-- Arthur Cayley -
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.
-- Arthur Eddington -
I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.
-- Asghar Farhadi -
I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don't really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.
-- Asghar Farhadi -
C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.
-- Auguste Comte -
I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.
-- Augusten Burroughs -
Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.
-- Augusten Burroughs -
No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No democracy works without compromise. But when Governor Romney and his allies in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficit by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy - well, you do the math. I refuse to go along with that. And as long as I'm President, I never will.
-- Barack Obama -
Mathematical objects are determined by - and understood by - the network of relationships they enjoy with all the other objects of their species.
-- Barry Mazur -
It's kind of hard to rally around a math class.
-- Bear Bryant -
I couldn't picture myself with a boyfriend, but if I had to, I envisioned a nice normal guy who turned in his math homework on time and maybe even played rec baseball.
-- Becca Fitzpatrick -
Spending when the math's not there and the numbers aren't there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it's filled with IOUs because the government's been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion.
-- Ben Quayle -
That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It's the same all over the world.
-- Ben Sherwood -
No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
-- Benoit Mandelbrot -
The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
-- Bernard DeVoto -
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
-- Bertrand Russell -
BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.
-- Bertrand Russell -
Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.
-- Bill Cosby -
We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
-- Bill McKibben -
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
-- Blaise Pascal -
The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
-- Blaise Pascal -
It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.
-- Blaise Pascal -
I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don't have a great ear. It's like a tragedy - I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.
-- Bo Burnham -
In fact, NSF was the leading successful efforts to improve U.S. math and science education long before the Department of Education was even created.
-- Bob Inglis -
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
-- Bonnie Jo Campbell -
I joke around all the time, 'I'm Asian; I'm really good at math.'
-- Brenda Song -
In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.
-- Brian Greene -
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.
-- Bruce Dickinson -
Music is not math. It's science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.
-- Bruno Mars -
The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.
-- C. West Churchman -
The motto I have penned on my knuckles is that this is the best world we have--because it's the only world we have. It's the simplest math ever. However many terrible, rankling, peeve-inducing things may occur, there are always libraries. And rain-falling-on-sea. And the moon. And love. There is always something to look back on, with satisfaction, or forward to, with joy. There is always a moment where you boggle at the world--at yourself--at the whole, unlikely, precarious business of being alive--and then start laughing
-- Caitlin Moran -
In college, you had to worry about that math class or this exam that's coming up on Tuesday, but not in the professionals. You eat, sleep, and do everything related to your craft - and your craft is football. You can be at it from sunup to sundown.
-- Cam Newton -
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
The higher arithmetic presents us with an inexhaustible store of interesting truths - of truths, too, which are not isolated, but stand in a close internal connection, and between which, as our knowledge increases, we are continually discovering new and sometimes wholly unexpected ties.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
The propositions of mathematics are devoid of all factual content; they convey no information whatever on any empirical subject matter.
-- Carl Gustav Hempel -
The object of mathematics is the honor of the human spirit.
-- Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi -
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
-- Carl Sandburg -
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
-- Carl Sandburg -
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
-- Carl Sandburg -
So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!
-- Carol S. Dweck -
All I wanted to do was put together one of the best home maths systems in the world, and that's what we've done. I've loved numbers since I was two or three, and I get really excited about them. Now, I'm allowing myself to get excited about things. If you're doing it for a TV network or any major corporation, you have to put a lid on it a little.
-- Carol Vorderman -
Today, over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.
-- Cathy McMorris Rodgers -
Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
-- Cathy McMorris Rodgers -
We need to tap the resource of current and retiring science and math professionals that have both content mastery and the practical experience to serve as effective teachers.
-- Cathy McMorris Rodgers -
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
-- Charles Baudelaire
