Quotes About Mathematics

“Its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds;”

— Edward Feser

“It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests - and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear.”

— Upton Sinclair

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep
all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

— Aravind Adiga

“Do you know why I love mathematics?"
"Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"
Eccles snorted in surprise. "Well, yes, but there's another reason.”

— Brendan Halpin

“In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.”

— Paul Goodman

“There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?”

— Ken Robinson

“Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself. Hence there is no reason why those things which may be learned from philosophical science, so far as they can be known by natural reason, may not also be taught us by another science so far as they fall within revelation. Hence theology included in sacred doctrine differs in kind from that theology which is part of philosophy. SECOND ARTICLE [I, Q.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages, mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have-I believe the English already use the phrase-"parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma-Beelzebub, what a useful word!-by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out 'A Cat Sat On A Mat'.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.”

— Robert Quine

“Children must be taught mathematics well in anywhere under every condition at every age and so we can have more rational, more logical societies!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“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

“My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.”

— Lawrence R. Klein

“Hurry was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

“What mathematics are to matter and force, occult science is to life and consciousness,”

— Dion Fortune

“Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom ... .”

— Michael Lewis

“We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.”

— Patti Smith

“We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.”

— Richard M. Nixon

“I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.”

— René Descartes

“A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.”

— Howard Whitley Eves

“Mathematics may be likened to a large rock whose interior composition we wish to examine. The older mathematicians appear as persevering stone cutters slowly attempting to demolish the rock from the outside with hammer and chisel. The later mathematicians resemble expert miners who seek vulnerable veins, drill into these strategic places, and then blast the rock apart with well placed internal charges.”

— Howard Whitley Eves

“Only in homeopathy do you get specific remedies for people who believe they are made of glass, have a delusion that they are selling green vegetables, or have an aptitude for, or a horror of, mathematics.”

— Scarlett Thomas

“There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.”

— Raymond Louis Wilder

“The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people. And combining the two is creating this beautiful alliance between humanity and nature. That's why my forests are mathematical expansion systems, all of them.”

— Agnes Denes

“He loved numbers, their patterns and secrets, the way something complex could be reduced to something simple. In mathematics, unlike life, there was always a solution, a definite answer.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.”

— Robert Heilbroner

“We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists' attempts to describe nature.”

— Alexander Markovich Polyakov

“Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.”

— Robert Musil

“No one really knew the sciences except the Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, by reason of his length of life and experience, as well as of his studiousness and zeal. He knew mathematics and perspective, and there was nothing which he was unable to know; and at the same time he was sufficiently acquainted with languages to be able to understand the saints and the philosophers and the wise men of antiquity but his knowledge of languages was not such as to enable him to effect translations until the latter portion of his life ...”

— Roger Bacon

“The word "mathematics" is a Greek word and, by origin, it means "something that has been learned or understood," or perhaps "acquired knowledge," or perhaps even, somewhat against grammar, "acquirable knowledge," that is, "learnable knowledge," that is, "knowledge acquirable by learning."”

— Salomon Bochner

“On the basis of my historical experience, I fully believe that mathematics of the 25th century will be as different from that of today as the latter is from that of the 16th century.”

— George Sarton

“Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics.”

— Benjamin Haydon

“We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we
want to talk "about" mathematics!”

— Harold Jeffreys

“What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.”

— Stanislaw Ulam

“There are fields of scientific work ... which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology ... in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.”

— Norbert Wiener

“It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts.”

— Paul Halmos

“Mathematics is not a language, it's an adventure”

— Paul Lockhart

“Mathematics is nothing more, nothing less, than the exact part of our thinking.”

— L. E. J. Brouwer

“The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

“Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

“Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.”

— Jean-Baptiste Say

“You can only hear clearly when you sit quietly, when you give your attention. Nor can you have order if you are not free to watch, if you are not free to listen, if you are not free to be considerate. This problem of freedom and order is one of the most difficult and urgent problems in life. It is a very complex problem. It needs to be thought over much more than mathematics, geography, or history.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

“Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, "purely formal".”

— Bertrand Russell

“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

“The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.”

— G.H. Hardy

“I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.”

— G.H. Hardy

“The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.”

— John Von Neumann

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

— Leonardo Da Vinci

“Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.”

— Leonardo Da Vinci