Example Quote by Michael Atiyah

Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical…

— Henri Poincare

The usefulness of mathematics in furthering the sciences is commonly acknowledged: but outside the ranks of the experts there is little inquiry into its…

— Herbert Turnbull

For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject…

— Keith Devlin

Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it.

— Christopher Robin Milne

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be…

— Raymond Louis Wilder

Mathematics is realm altogether, one that is cold, hard, objective, necessary, clear and thus utterly non-human. Nonetheless, it is enormously useful as a means,…

— David Roochnik

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

I don't want to convince you that mathematics is useful. It is, but utility is not the only criterion for value to humanity. Above…

— Ian Stewart

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is…

— Hermann Weyl

A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly…

— John Von Neumann

The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it.

— Jacques Hadamard

The world is anxious to admire that apex and culmination of modern mathematics: a theorem so perfectly general that no particular application of it…

— George Polya