Mathematical Quotations

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form

I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but I don't have a mathematical brain.

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.

We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.

There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.

I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

The orthodox believers in God are divided into two camps, one of which maintains that the existence of God is as demonstrable as any mathematical proposition, while the other asserts that his existence is not demonstrable to the intellect.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity... is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.

Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.

If you had done something twice, you are likely to do it again.

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.

I never use a computer.

Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

The world is more than the sum of its suffering.

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.

Has the mathematical abilities of a Clydesdale.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded...

There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn’t some magical thing that just started happening.

A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. []

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

Under the federal reserve act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figured, a mathematical equation.

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

We do not master a scientific theory until we have shelled and completely prised free its mathematical kernel.

Democracy is not a mathematical deduction proved once and for all time. Democracy is a just faith fervently held, commitment to be tested again and again in the fiery furnace of history.

The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker.

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

In my free time I do differential and integral calculus.

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur Mathematics is written for mathematicians De Revolutionibus

If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.

Fourier is a mathematical poem.

[Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat] ... Fourier's great mathematical poem ...

It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.

Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.

Before you generalize, formalize, and axiomatize there must be mathematical substance.

How is error possible in mathematics?

It took me 1057 pages to describe the hundreds of mathematical equations, algorithms and programming techniques that I invented and used.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

A good deal of my research in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problem, but simply examining mathematical equations of a kind that physicists use and trying to fit them together in an interesting way, regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later to have an application. Then one has good luck. At age 78.

A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.

But if two and two and fifty make a million,...

We never know what we are talking about.

If there was some sort of mathematical equation for beauty, I don’t know if I would be the algorithm. I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

The explorer is the person who is lost.

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.

Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind.

The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s.

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

A painting is more than the sum of its parts

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

It is not certain that everything is uncertain.

Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.

To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. G. is (x + 1)- ecrable.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

I cannot do it without comp[u]ters.

I am ill at these numbers.

One nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.

A mathematical equation stands forever

I became more and more convinced that even nature could be understood as a relatively simple mathematical structure.