Explore Quotes on Math

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

I certainly do care about measuring educational results. But what is an 'educational result?' The twinkling eyes of my students, together with their heartfelt and beautifully expressed mathematical arguments are all the results I need.

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.

Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.

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

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?

Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.

It's kind of hard to rally around a math class.

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

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.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience