Quotes on Mathematician

The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing stock from a mathematician's point of view.

Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.

What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

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

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

Mathematicians are born, not made.

If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough.

It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.

It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

In mathematics, if I find a new approach to a problem, another mathematician might claim that he has a better, more elegant solution. In chess, if anybody claims he is better than I, I can checkmate him.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

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

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support ... The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

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.

For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined; one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination; but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.