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Quotes by Mathematician
"The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles."
12
"The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past."
12
"The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue."
12
"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
12
"Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects."
12
"As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained."
12
"So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution."
12
"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."
12
"Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority."
12
"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas."
12
"God made integers, all else is the work of man."
12
"The developing science departs at the same time more and more from its original scope and purpose and threatens to sacrifice its earlier unity and split into diverse branches."
12
"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."
12
"That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest."
12
"I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream."
12
"Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education."
12
"Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics."
12
"We conclude that, simultaneously with the organization of the colleges, there should be at Santa Cruz an organization by disciplines, whose units would have a voice in appointments and promotions, in course of programs, and in the allocation of funds for research."
12
"I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time."
11
"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy."
11
"You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length."
11
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."
11
"The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future."
11
"It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded."
11
"Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird."
Will,
11
"Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling patterns in time and space."
11
"Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language."
11
"Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance."
11
"The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation."
11
"I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences."
11
"I do engineering, not religion."
11
"I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy."
11
"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."
11
"Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books."
11
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that."
11
"I am inclined to attach some importance to the new system of manufacturing; and venture to throw it out with the hope of its receiving a full discussion among those who are most interestedin the subject."
11
"They cannot count on the press and they cannot count on Congressional committees to bring the problems of the scientific community to their own attention, or to police the scientific community."
11
"I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue."
11
"The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet."
11
"Ideas rose in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination."
11
"To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me."
11
"Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes."
11
"If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."
11
"Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself."
11
"I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers."
11
"Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning."
11
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