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Quotes by Mathematician
"Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning."
11
"Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity."
11
"No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does."
11
"Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that."
11
"In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory."
11
"It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details."
11
"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."
11
"At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged."
11
"As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn't effective unless you had a journal. That's about all I know."
11
"The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom."
10
"Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders."
10
"My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men."
10
"A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance."
10
"To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings."
10
"The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions."
10
"But be that as it may, I think it is more respectful to you that I should speak to you upon and do my best to interest you in the subject which has occupied me, and in which I am myself most interested."
10
"The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis."
10
"What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed."
10
"Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate."
10
"We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge."
10
"Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one."
10
"There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation."
10
"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination."
10
"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."
10
"Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express."
10
"I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction."
10
"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts."
10
"The early study of Euclid made me a hater of geometry."
10
"All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers."
10
"The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science."
10
"Why should I be worried about dying? It's not going to happen in my lifetime!"
10
"A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter."
10
"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."
10
"My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher."
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"The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development."
10
"I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house."
10
"If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future."
10
"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."
10
"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."
10
"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."
10
"Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability."
10
"Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth."
10
"A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations."
Mind,
10
"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."
10
"It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious."
10
"Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle."
10
"I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium."
10
"The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?"
10
"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."
10
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