Quotes about Mathematics

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
-Albert Einstein

"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."
-Henry David Thoreau

"It is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain."
-Albert Einstein

"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning."
-Plato

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."
-Nikola Tesla

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture."
-Bertrand Russell

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
-Bertrand Russell

"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
-Johann von Neumann

"Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

"The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type."
-Georg Cantor

"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

"The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence."
-Charles Caleb Colton

"The mathematics is not there till we put it there."
-Sir Arthur Eddington

"To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts."
-Ivars Peterson

"What I assert and believe to have demonstrated in this and earlier works is that following the finite there is a transfinite (which one could also call the supra-finite), that is an unbounded ascending lader of definite modes, which by their nature are not finite but infinite, but which just like the finite can be determined by well-defined and distinguishable numbers."
-Georg Cantor

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

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-Albert Einstein

"There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer."
-Voltaire

"Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry."
-Stephen Hawking

"Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"These will be computer related courses taught by departments in the College, not by computer science. So an example of that kind of course would be a digital music course or a certain mathematics course."
-Thomas Horton

"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."
-Felix Klein

"The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This can't be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is."
-David Deutsch

"In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems."
-Georg Cantor

"One of the reasons we have a facility like this is we're trying to spark the interest of science and mathematics in children."
-Lorraine Pace

"The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom."
-Georg Cantor

"Let's not escape into mathematics. Let's stay with reality."
-Michael Crichton

"The mathematics faculty were encouraging me to shift into mathematics as my major and explaining to me that it was not almost impossible to make a good career in America as a mathematician. So I... became officially a student of mathematics. And in the end I had learned and progressed so much in mathematics that they gave me an M.S. in addition to my B.S. when I graduated."
-John Nash