Mathematician Quotes

402 quotes by 263 authors

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. — Henry Adams
[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science. — Thomas B. Macaulay
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time,… — Hermann Hesse
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the… — Walt Whitman
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. — Charles Darwin
In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed… — Henri Lebesgue
There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary… — Daniel Bernoulli
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product… — Edwin Howard Armstrong
If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has… — Cassius Jackson Keyser
What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking… — Paul Halmos
In 1975, ... [speaking with Shiing Shen Chern], I told him I had finally learned ... the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern-Weil… — Chen-Ning Yang
A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane. — J. Willard Gibbs
I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it… — Brand Blanshard
Like MoliÃ¨re's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware… — Ernest Nagel
On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism… — Jean Dieudonne
Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of… — Robert Kanigel
How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him… — Clifford Truesdell
True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men and… — David O. McKay
Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it. — Leo Tolstoy
Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague… — Bernard Bolzano

Who Wrote These Mathematician Quotes

263 authors contributed a total of 402 Mathematician Quotes, led by these top contributors: