Quotes on Math

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.

Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.

Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation.

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.

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.

I don't believe in mathematics.

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

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.