Quotes on Mathematics

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

There can never be surprises in logic.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?