top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Mathematician
"Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books."
46
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
46
"Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems."
46
"The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes."
46
"Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about."
46
"By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large."
46
"It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all."
46
"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it."
45
"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."
45
"The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development."
45
"Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries."
45
"Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall."
45
"If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future."
45
"Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few."
45
"The half minute which we daily devote to the winding-up of our watches is an exertion of labour almost insensible; yet, by the aid of a few wheels, its effect is spread over the whole twenty-four hours."
45
"Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has."
45
"Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes."
45
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers."
45
"No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe."
45
"The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700."
45
"There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years."
45
"Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope."
45
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
45
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
44
"I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest."
44
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
44
"And in another point of view, I think it is right that the address of a president should be on his own subject, and that different subjects should be thus brought in turn before the meetings."
44
"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude."
44
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."
44
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that."
44
"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
44
"Statistics is the grammar of science."
44
"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."
44
"When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that."
44
"In the mid-'60s in Berkeley, the theory of measure spaces of economic agents became one of my main interests."
44
"The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure."
44
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
43
"Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name."
43
"A suggestion had been made to me looking toward a professorship in some Western college, but after due consideration, I declined to consider the matter."
43
"I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months."
43
"If one looks at the different problems of the integral calculus which arise naturally when one wishes to go deep into the different parts of physics, it is impossible not to be struck by the analogies existing."
43
"Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning."
43
"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."
43
"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."
43
"That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest."
43
bottom of page