More math quotes

Aug 6, 2009

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics. 
~Gregory Bateson



Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. 
~Robert Heinlein



You may be an engineer if your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place.


The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones.  Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very definite way.  Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed.  Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions. 
~Ronald L. Graham



We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it.  Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. 
~Mark Twain



Can you do Division?  Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that? 
~Lewis Carroll



Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal. 
~Tobias Dantzig



Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers. 
~Nicholas Eberstadt



The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy.  Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination. 
~Thomas Hill



I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness....
~Stendhal - Henri Beyle



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



God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically. 
~Albert Einstein



If there is a God, he's a great mathematician. 
~Paul Dirac



To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology. 
~Hilda Phoebe Hudson



The different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. 
~Lewis Carroll



Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. 
~Henri Poincaré



Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling.



Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
~Bertrand Russell



God is real, unless declared integer.



If a healthy minded person takes an interest in science, he gets busy with his mathematics and haunts the laboratory. 
~W.S. Franklin



Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. 
~Arthur Stanley Eddington



There was a young man from Trinity,
Who solved the square root of infinity.
While counting the digits,
He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
~Author Unknown



One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers... 
~Heinrich Hertz



In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers.



The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. 
~Euclid



In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes.  In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure. 
~Hermann Hankel



Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.  Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.  I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. 
~Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky



I know that two and two make four - & should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure. 
~George Gordon



Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting.  There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.
~Ernst Mach



Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature.  Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding. 
~Percy William Bridgman


A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars.  That's subtraction. 
~Mae West



I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own.  A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example.  Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants.  Eleven is tough, an outdoors man who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation.... 
~Paul Auster



Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful? 
~Pliny the Elder


Uneven numbers are the gods' delight. 
~Virgil



One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories. 
~Philip J. Davis

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