Quotes on Math

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Widening the talent pipeline sufficiently will require a generational commitment to teaching math and science, providing technical training, and mentoring young people of all backgrounds so they understand the full range of possibilities that a career in technology affords.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it's not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, 'Hey, I can't really figure those things out.'

I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

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

Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.

Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.

For a good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it seem almost like a live teacher.

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.