Quotes on Learning Math

I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

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.

Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

Geometry is the foundation of all painting.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

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