Habit Quote by John Edensor Littlewood

“In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold…

— Edgar Allan Poe

“We have the oddest conversations.” “I find this conversation more than odd. It’s positively shocking.” “Why? Because I understand the principle of a logarithm?…

— Tessa Dare

Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity…

— Augustus De Morgan

...the science of calculation also is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic…

— Thomas Jefferson

“All polynomials of degree n-those that have a leading term of x^n- split into n distinct terms. This is the fundamental theorem of algebra.”

— Charles Seife

I've said it before: equations are the devil's sentences. The worst one is that quadratic equation, an infernal salad of numbers, letters, and symbols.

— Stephen Colbert

“Exponentials are the devils of mathematics.”

— Liu Cixin

“For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn,…

— Louis Poinsot

Said about Napier's logarithms: . . . by shortening the labors doubled the life of the astronomer.

— Pierre-Simon Laplace

“...by shortening the labours doubled the life of the astronomer. { On the benefit of John Napier 's logarithms .}”

— Pierre-Simon Laplace

“That was the great thing about numbers: it required no faith to believe that two plus two equaled four. And math never, ever condemned…

— Michael Grant

The quantity of meaning compressed into small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on…

— Charles Babbage