[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out…

We never know what we are talking about.

— Karl Popper

Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.

— Tobias Dantzig

Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

— Plato

Mathematics is not a deductive science, that's a cliché ... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

— Paul Halmos

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.

— Carl Sandburg

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

— Tom Lehrer

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

— Carl Sandburg

The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.

— Paul Halmos

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

— Johannes Kepler

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.

— Isaac Barrow

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.

— Carl Benjamin Boyer

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

— Charles Darwin

It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.

— Samuil Shatunovsky

Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.

— Saul Perlmutter

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add…

— John Forbes Nash