Mathematics Quotations

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

I was a good student with mathematical ability and interests. As such, I took the usual college preparatory program in high school for one looking to become an engineer: all the available courses in mathematics and science.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

An early fascination with higher mathematics at the university level blossomed into speculative thinking that could provide a basis for dealing with economic issues.

To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it.

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'

Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.

I changed the course of my life, from the rigidity of mathematics and the corporate rhythm to a more bohemian world.

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.

Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it.

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

I believe that great success is possible in any field — from music to mathematics to macro trading.

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

I wasn't actually very naturally good at economics. My brain doesn't work very well, in terms of mathematics.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly, and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to 'Non-Cooperative Games,' also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

My father's family hails from Banaras. My grandfather taught mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Banaras is also dedicated to Lord Shiva, home to one of the great jyotirlings, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.

Films are not mathematics - that's the first thing you need to understand. At least, that's how I feel. They are not words on paper. Films are made with people, with teams and with individual bundles of creativity coming together to fulfill the vision of an individual who is the director of the film.

Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

I was reasonably interested in mathematics in school. Typically what happens is... when you start playing chess, it takes up a lot of your attention. But about 10 years ago, I found that the Internet is very good to start learning about a lot of subjects.

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, mathematical certainty. It is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise. It is, and must be, mathematical explanation.

I'd like to be able to design as easily as if I was using Photoshop. I'd like to be able to create a multicolumn layout and control source order without having to do advanced mathematics or hire Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm to figure out the CSS, because I can't.

Without mathematics, we are blind.

In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality . . . creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I've also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I've got the skills for both.

I encourage their parents to take them to L.A., if possible. The state fair inspires many to pursue careers in math and the sciences.

If a challenge arises that needs mathematics to solve it, I like to be able to know how to do it. I do find solving some things entertaining.

If any of them that come through the program are having trouble in math, I'll tutor them. (Teaching) is the most important thing I do.

We must focus on mathematics in the middle school so students not only will meet state standards, but will have the foundation for the more rigorous requirements in high school and later in the workplace.

I am a passionate reader, having been tutored very early by my mother. I avidly devoured all books on chemistry that I could find. Formal chemistry at school seemed boring by comparison, and my performance was routine. In contrast, I did spectacularly well in mathematics and sailed through classes and exams with ease.

If Steve is back at point guard, that's four point guards. I'm not trying to make decisions for anybody, but the mathematics of that just don't add up.

When they go to Liz Claiborne and find out that you have to study mathematics (and) you have to know computer technology, that changes what you think you'll take next year in school.

My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.

I was always the kid in school that teachers were getting after to be quiet. My report card had math, A, reading, A, spelling, A, science, A, conduct, F. I was always talking to somebody. They would always take me and put me over in a corner by myself.

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze.

Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true

Mathematics is the queen of sciences and arithmetic is the queen of mathematics

Our mathematics test scores are going to be late in coming, and we won't have that information in time for parents to make a timely decision about whether they want to transfer their children. The state of North Carolina has requested that the federal government switch the sanctions for this year only.

It is an attempt to steer students to become more interested in science and mathematics and improve their overall student achievement.

I think the school's test scores that I've seen in the papers recently show that this new math thing really isn't what it was cracked up to be. It should be revisited.

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I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough... also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I could realize the objective of a Ph.D. thesis with the other results.

You get to use your head. People think it's just whatever cards you get, but there's a lot of thought involved. There's math involved, trying to figure out what your chances are compared to others.

Using current mathematics and technology, it is impossible to even consider factoring a 1024-bit number. I'm not willing to make any hard predictions about tomorrow.