Bars Quote by Kenneth E. Boulding

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity…

— Kenneth E. Boulding

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending…

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise…

— Johnny Ball

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an…

— Edsger Dijkstra

...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept…

— Paul Halmos

“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

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a…

— Clifford Geertz

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has…

— Paul Dirac

The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws…

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Tom Lehrer

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

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

— Martin Gardner