Creativity Quote by George Polya

“Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. [Upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry] ”

— David Hilbert

No mathematician of equal stature has risen from our generation... Hilbert was singularly free from national and racial prejudices; in all public questions, be…

— Hermann Weyl

“It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”

— Karl Weierstrass

A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

— Karl Weierstrass

I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are…

— Alonzo Church

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

— Sofia Kovalevskaya

What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the…

— David Eugene Smith

“Strange as it may seem, not all of the great mathematicians have been professors in colleges or universities. Quite a few were soldiers by…

— Eric Temple Bell

“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

“Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

— Edgar Allan Poe

The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered…

— John von Neumann