Incidents Quote by Tobias Dantzig

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very…

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Sure, some [teachers] could give the standard limit definitions, but they [the students] clearly did not understand the definitions - and it would be…

— Keith Devlin

“It is true that doing original math is 'lonely.' But it is also true that professional mathematicians compose a community.”

— David Foster Wallace

Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations.

— Ralph P. Boas, Jr

Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics - at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math…

— Keith Devlin

They [the mathematicians of the Enlightenment] defined their terms vaguely and used their methods loosely, and the logic of their arguments was made to…

— Tobias Dantzig

“Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was…

— Mark Haddon

“It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately…

— Francis Crick

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very…

— Dominic Cummings

Some humans are mathematicians-others aren't.

— Jane Goodall

As for mathematicians themselves: don't expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such…

— Apostolos Doxiadis