Beginning Quote by Benoit Mandelbrot

“In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from…

— Alexander Grothendieck

Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.

— Tom Lehrer

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

You know we all became mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy.

— Maxwell Rosenlicht

“I had better say something here about this question of age, since it is particularly important for mathematicians. No mathematician should ever allow himself…

— G.H. Hardy

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

— Bill Gaede

Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary…

— Edward Charles Titchmarsh

In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They…

— Robert Musil

Mathematicians grow very old; it is a healthy profession. The reason you live long is that you have pleasant thoughts. Math and physics are…

— Dirk Jan Struik

A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war,…

— Eric Temple Bell

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they…

— Edsger Dijkstra

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I…

— Carl Sandburg