Arithmetic Quote by David van Dantzig

The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

— Freeman Dyson

In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet…

— Nikolai Lobachevsky

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly…

— Rebecca Goldstein

Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure…

— Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Here I beg you to observe in passing that the scruples that prevented ancient writers from using arithmetical terms in geometry, and which can…

— Rene Descartes

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line,…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Numbers were originally abstractions, invented just to quantify things, to count rocks or people or grapes or whatever. The fact that dust floating in…

— Kevin Guilfoile

Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student's mathematical life. Painful and creatively frustrating as it may be,…

— Paul Lockhart

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and…

— Anonymous

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort…

— Terence Tao

The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius…

— Dominic Cummings

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

— Eugene Wigner