top of page
.png){kind=small}
Mathematics Quotes
"Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper."
58
"There should be no such thing as boring mathematics."
46
"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."
29
"The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself."
15
"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."
11
"To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be."
11
"Mathematics doesn't care about those beyond the numbers."
11
"I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto."
10
"I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about."
10
"The mathematics is not there till we put it there."
10
"I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics."
10
"He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus."
9
"In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics."
8
"We are servants rather than masters in mathematics."
8
"The square root of I is I."
8
"The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing."
8
"My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one."
7
"Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's."
7
"The infinite in mathematics is alway unruly unless it is properly treated."
7
""Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."
7
"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."
7
"The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence."
6
"It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer."
6
"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."
6
"I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959."
6
"You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality."
6
"In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race."
5
"The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes."
5
"No more Lastrygonians. Ella fluttered down and landed next to them. "Six minus six is zero. Spears are good for subtraction, yep."
5
"I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy."
5
"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
5
"I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way."
4
"Few rounds.... I am damn good mathematician!2 999 999 999 999 999 999 + 11 999 999 999 999 999 999 = 14 999 999 999 999 999 998."
4
bottom of page