Quotes on Mathematics

Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.

So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

To give emphasis only to beauty makes me think of a mathematics that deals with positive numbers only.

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.

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem,above all other sciences,is_x000D_ that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable,while those of all_x000D_ other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being_x000D_ overthrown by newly discovered facts.

The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don't understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

Inspiration is the impact of a fact on a well-prepared mind

He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.

God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

I regard it as an inelegance, or imperfection, in quaternions, or rather in the state to which it has been hitherto unfolded, whenever it becomes or seems to become necessary to have recourse to x, y, z, etc.

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

Nature is written in mathematical language.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.