We like Mathematics: Mathematics Quotes

Famous Mathematics Quotes

(Source https://www.math.okstate.edu/~wli/teach/fmq.html)

Mathematics:
She reminds you of the invisible forms of the soul;
she gives life to her own discoveries;
she awakens the mind and purifies the intellect;
she brings to light our intrinsic ideas;
she abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth

... Diadochus Proclus (410-485)

Archimedes (287-212 B. C. E)

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.
Eureka, euraka!
Don't spoil my circles! (or Do not disturb my circles!)
There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.

Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E)

There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.
It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

Roger Bacon (1214-1294)

In mathematics I can report no deficiency, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics.
Mathematics is the door and key to the sciences.
Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of the world.
There are four great sciences ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics, which the saints discovered at the beginning of the world.
... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

Bernhard Bolzano (1781-1848)

My special pleasure in mathematics rested particularly on its purely speculative part.
Even in the realm of things which do not claim actuality, and do not even claim possibility, there exist beyond dispute sets which are infinite.

George Boole (1815-1869)

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be occupied with the ideas of number and quantity.
No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.

Geoge Cantor (1845-1918)

The essence of mathematics is its freedom.
In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.
every transfinite consistent multiplicity, that is, every transfinite set, must have a definite aleph as its cardinal number.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
With me everything turns into mathematics.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.
There have been only Mathematicians who were able to find some proofs, that is to say some sure and certain reasons.

Democritus (460-370 B. C)

I would rather discover one scientific fact than become King of Persia.
Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.
I don't believe in mathematics.
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.
Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.

Euclid of Alexandria (325-265 B.C.E)

There is no royal road to geometry.
A youth who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learnt the first proposition, inquired, "What do I get by learning these things?" So Euclid called a slave and said "Give him threepence, since he must make a gain out of what he learns."

Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 B. C. E)

Willingly would I burn to death like Phaeton, were this the price for reaching the sun and learning its shape, its size and its substance.

Euripides (485-406 B. C. E)

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.
And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege

(1848-1925)

Arithmetic has began to totter.
Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.
What are numbers? What is the nature of arithmetical truth?

Carl Friedrich Gauss

(1777-1855)-German

I am ever more convinced that the necessity of our geometry cannot be proved -- at least not by human reason for human reason.
Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics.
God does arithmetic.
Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Kurt Godel (1906-1978)

Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.
I don't believe in natural science.
The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.

Paul Albert Gordan (1837-1912)

This (axiomatic math) is no longer mathematics, it is theology.

Hermann Gunter Grassmann

(1809-1877)

Pure Mathematics is the science of the individual object in as much as it is born in thought.
Pure Mathematics is the theory of forms.

Jacques Salomon Hadamard

(1865-1963)

To parents who despair because their children are unable to master the first problems in arithmetic I can dedicate my examples. For, in arithmetic, until the seventh grade I was last or nearly last.
Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition.

Hermann Hankel

(1839-1873)

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built, and what one has established, another undoes. In Mathematics alone each generation adds a new storey to the old structure.

Charles Hermite (1822-1901)

I believe that numbers and functions of Analysis are not the arbitrary result of our minds; I think that they exist outside of us, with the same character of necessity as the things of objective reality, and we meet them or discover them, and study them, as do the physicists, the chemists and the zoologists.
We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.
Analysis takes back with one hand what it gives with the other. I recoil in fear and loathing from that deplorable evil: continuous functions with no derivatives.

David Hilbert (1862-1943)

Mathematics is a game played according to certain rules with meaningless marks on paper.
No one will expel us from this paradise Cantor has created for us.
The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.
Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man.

Carl Gustav Jacobi(1804-1851)

God ever arithmetizes.
One should always generalize.
The real end of science is the honour of the human mind.
Mathematics is the science of what is clear by itself.
The God that reigns in Olympus is Number Eternal.

Lord William Thomson Kelvin

(1824-1907)

When you can measure what you are talking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God.
Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.
I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body's shadow lies here.

Leopold Kronecker (1823-1891)

God created the natural number, and all the rest is the work of man.
Of what use is your (Lindemann's proof of transcendental of pi) beautiful investigation regarding pi ? Why study such problems when irrational numbers do not exist ?
Number theorists are like lotus-eaters - having tasted this food they can never give it up.

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

As long as algebra and geometry have been separated, their progress have been slow and their uses limited; but when these two sciences have been united, they have lent each mutual forces, and have marched together towards perfection.

Johann Lambert (1728-1777)

I should almost therefore put forward the proposal that the third hypothesis (angle sum of a triangle less than two right angles) holds on the surface of an imaginary sphere.
Proofs of the Euclidean [parallel] postulate can be developed to such an extent that apparently a mere trifle remains. But a careful analysis shows that in this seeming trifle lies the crux of the matter; usually it contains either the proposition that is being proved or a postulate equivalent to it.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But it’s very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Andrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833)

These ... tables (values of trigonometry functions), constructed by means of new techniques based principally on the calculus of differences, are one of the most beautiful monuments ever erected to science.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful resource of the human spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being.

John Von Neumann (1903-1957)

We must regard classical mathematics as a combinatorial game played with symbols.

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

It is the glory of geometry that from so few principles, fetched from without, it is able to accomplish so much.
The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn.
God created everything by number, weight and measure.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
To speak freely of mathematics, I find it the highest exercise of the spirit; but at the same time I know that it is so useless that I make little distinction between a man who is only a mathematician and a common artisan. Also, I call it the most beautiful profession in the world; but it is only a profession;
The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it.

Plato (429-347 B. C. E),

Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
... Arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.
Mathematicians are born, not made.
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. [As opposed to the quotation: Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing].
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects. Thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only.

Matthew Prior (1664-1721)

Circles to square and cubes to double would give a man exercise trouble.

Diadochus Proclus (410-485)

Wherever there is number, there is beauty.
According to most accounts, geometry was first discovered among the Egyptians, taking its origin from the measurement of areas. For they found it necessary by reason of the flooding of the Nile, which wiped out everybody's proper boundaries. Nor is there anything surprising in that the discovery both of this and of the other sciences should have had its origin in a practical need, since everything which is in process of becoming progresses from the imperfect to the perfect.

Diadochus Proclus (410-485)

The Pythagoreans considered all mathematical science to be divided into four parts: one half they marked off as concerned with quantity, the other half with magnitude; and each of these they posited as twofold. A quantity can be considered in regard to its character by itself or in relation to another quantity, magnitudes as either stationary or in motion. Arithmetic, then, studies quantity as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics magnitude inherently moving.

Pythagoras (572-497 B.C. E)

· All was numbers.

Number was the substance of all things.
Number rules the universe.
Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons.
Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent.
There is geometry in the humming of the strings.

Bernard Riemann (1826-1866)

If only I had the theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.
What remains to be resolved is the question of knowing to what extent and up to what point these hypotheses are found to be confirmed by experience.
It is well known that geometry presupposes not only the concept of space but also the first fundamental notions for constructions in space as given in advance. It only gives nominal definitions for them, while the essential means of determining them appear in the form of axioms.

Joseph Alfred Serret (1819-1885)

Algebra is, properly speaking, the Analysis of equations.

Socrates (469-399 B. C. E)

The understanding of mathematics is necessary for a sound grasp of ethics.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
No Roman ever lost his life because he was absorbed in the contemplation of a mathematical diagram.
Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been create for rendering clear the quantitative aspect of the world.
The science of pure mathematics may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (1885-1955)

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the devil exists since its consistency cannot be proved.
If the game of mathematics is actually consisting, then the formula of consistency cannot be proved within this game.
Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.
Symmetry, as wide or narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.