Best Mathematics Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“I abandoned the assigned problems in standard calculus textbooks and followed my curiosity. Wherever I happened to be--a Vegas casino, Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, or sweating on the elliptical in Boesel's Green Microgym--I asked myself, "Where is the calculus in this experience?”

“The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.”

“Mathematics and poetry are the two ways to drink the beauty of truth.”

“Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.”

“People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy.”

“[...] provability is a weaker notion than truth”

“[”

“My own studies of the Vedas suggest the Vedic society was indeed far ahead of its time, contributing profoundly to cosmology, philosophy, medicine, and mathematics.”

“Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.”

“If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!”

“A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.”

“The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.”

“Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.”

“God made the integers; all the rest is the work of Man.”

“If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.”

“I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.”

“I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.”

“You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It's the stuff we can understand. It's cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.”

“Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.”

“What comes, is called.”

“The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.”

“When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”

“I had a polynomial once. My doctor removed it.”

“I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!”

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”