Math quotes and slogans
Aug 28, 2010What is a mathematician?
Apr 20, 2010
Here are some quotes from famous people regarding mathematicians:
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. (Paul Erdős)
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. (Charles Darwin)
A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician. (Brahmagupta)
Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me. (Abraham Flexner)
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful. (Martin Luther)
Click to read the comments on this entry...A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. (Paul Erdős)
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. (Charles Darwin)
A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician. (Brahmagupta)
Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me. (Abraham Flexner)
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful. (Martin Luther)
Plato Quote
Jan 30, 2010
Happy birthday Hawking, happy death day Galileo
Jan 8, 2010
Just a note that today is Stephen Hawking's birthday and also Galileo's death day.
Galileo Galilei
Born: Feb 15th, 1564 (Pisa)
Died: Jan 8th, 1642 (Arcetri)
Stephen William Hawking
Born: Jan 8th, 1942 (Oxford)
Died: Should have died five decades ago.
Hawking's birth occurred on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death!
Hawking says, "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science."
Click to read the comments on this entry...Galileo Galilei
Born: Feb 15th, 1564 (Pisa)
Died: Jan 8th, 1642 (Arcetri)
Stephen William Hawking
Born: Jan 8th, 1942 (Oxford)
Died: Should have died five decades ago.
Hawking's birth occurred on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death!
Hawking says, "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science."
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.
~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
Click to read the comments on this entry...~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
Cool math quotes
Aug 3, 2009
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
~John Louis von Neumann
Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
~Albert Einstein
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
~Albert Einstein
~John Louis von Neumann
Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
~Albert Einstein
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
~Albert Einstein
Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.
Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.
~Isaac Barrow
I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
~Calvin Trillin
If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.
~Phil Pastoret
A mathematician is a scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.
~Evan Esar
Math is radical!
It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
~Carl Sandburg
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
~Carl Sandburg
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
~Richard Preston
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.
So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
~Francis Bacon
The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.
~S. Gudder
The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.
The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
~Edward Gibbon
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
~Dean Schlicter
It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.
~Samuil Shchatunovski
Trigonometry is a sine of the times.
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
~W.S. Anglin
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
~Paul Erdos
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
The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.
~Morris Kline
Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
~Carl Boyer
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
~Eric Bell
Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
~Eric Hoffer
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
~Bertrand Russell
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
~Gottfried Leibniz
How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards? You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time.
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. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.
~Ivars Peterson
With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.
~Harold Marston Morse
Pure mathematics is the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub.
~Richard J. Trudeau
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
~Bertrand Russell
The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.
~John Kemeny
Click to read the comments on this entry...Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.
~Isaac Barrow
I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
~Calvin Trillin
If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.
~Phil Pastoret
A mathematician is a scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.
~Evan Esar
Math is radical!
It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
~Carl Sandburg
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
~Carl Sandburg
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
~Richard Preston
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.
So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
~Francis Bacon
The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.
~S. Gudder
The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.
The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
~Edward Gibbon
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
~Dean Schlicter
It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.
~Samuil Shchatunovski
Trigonometry is a sine of the times.
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
~W.S. Anglin
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
~Paul Erdos
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
The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.
~Morris Kline
Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
~Carl Boyer
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
~Eric Bell
Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
~Eric Hoffer
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.
~Bertrand Russell
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
~Gottfried Leibniz
How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards? You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time.
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. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.
~Ivars Peterson
With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.
~Harold Marston Morse
Pure mathematics is the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub.
~Richard J. Trudeau
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
~Bertrand Russell
The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.
~John Kemeny
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