Top 175 Mathematics Quotes

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties – axioms – that led to others.

By seventh grade, I was committed to mathematics.

A conventional truth can be important – it’s essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example – but it won’t give you an edge. It’s not a secret.

I cannot recall a period when I did not draw; and at school, the studies that were distasteful to me, mathematics and grammar, were retarded by the indulgence of teachers who were proud of my drawing faculties, and passed over my neglect of uncongenial subjects.

I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it’s up to you what you do with the symbols.

I was performing at a New Jersey high school, and I asked a class of 2,000 students, ‘How many of you love mathematics?’ and only one hand went up. And that was the hand of the maths teacher!

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can’t you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that’s different from a California textbook that’s different from a Massachusetts textbook. That’s very expensive.

We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.

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.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can’t do in the real world.

The broader the chess player you are, the easier it is to be competitive, and the same seems to be true of mathematics – if you can find links between different branches of mathematics, it can help you resolve problems. In both mathematics and chess, you study existing theory and use that to go forward.

Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don’t belong to any particular culture.

Mathematics is as old as Man.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

I can do lightning mathematics quicker than somebody can do them on a calculator.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I am severely dyslexic, so I’m not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don’t excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

‘Obvious’ is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.

Politics is not an exact science. That’s why in school I loved mathematics. Everything in mathematics was clear to me.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

The beauty of string theory is that it is all about mathematics. For that, you don’t need resources or labs. Just sit in your room and do the maths.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

I have been running maths clubs for children completely free. In my building in Bangalore, I conduct maths clubs for several months, and every child who attended the club was poor in mathematics and is now showing brilliant results.

I was reasonably interested in mathematics in school. Typically what happens is… when you start playing chess, it takes up a lot of your attention. But about 10 years ago, I found that the Internet is very good to start learning about a lot of subjects.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it’s supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

I travelled round the world giving demonstrations of my talents. In every country, I performed for students, professors, teachers, bankers, accountants, and even laymen who knew very little, or nothing at all, about mathematics.

At the age of 12, I developed an intense interest in mathematics. On exposure to algebra, I was fascinated by simultaneous equations and read ahead of the class to the end of the book.

There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it.

Why do children dread mathematics? Because of the wrong approach. Because it is looked at as a subject.

If you’re concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical – a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of – the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

At school, I wasn’t as interested in mathematics. I did OK, but at the earliest point I could stop doing math, I stopped.

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

It is pure mythology that women cannot perform as well as men in science, engineering and mathematics. In my experience, the opposite is true: Women are often more adept and patient at untangling complex problems, multitasking, seeing the possibilities in new solutions and winning team support for collaborative action.

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.

God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I’m especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

I have written a book called ‘In the Wonderland of Numbers.’ It’s about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician.

From the ages of five to twelve, I attended the Saint Laurence O’Toole elementary school in Lawrence, a city next to Methuen, and was taught by sisters of the Catholic order of Notre Dame de Namour. I enjoyed all my subjects there. I do not remember ever learning any science, except for mathematics.

A good part of ‘The Information’ is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Growing up, I was the odd bird. My interest in mathematics, my interest in the world, how I approach things from a scientific standpoint. You’re always going to be looked at as a different bird.

Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping God.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it’s too late by college.

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

The truth is that many of the writers of ‘The Simpsons’ are deeply in love with numbers, and their ultimate desire is to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don’t really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they’re really doing is mathematics – it’s not talking about things that have affected computer science; it’s mathematical logic.

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it’s actually the mathematics that led me to it.

In mathematics and science, there is no difference in the intelligence of men and women. The difference in genes between men and women is simply the Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with intelligence.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

I believe that great success is possible in any field – from music to mathematics to macro trading.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.

In this era of globalisation, I believe that the only way to push the Philippines forward is to focus our energy on improving English, mathematics, science, and technology.

All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.

At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

I got my mathematics degree because I wanted to teach deaf children math.

I’ve always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

One of the basic principles when you dealing with mathematics and Islam: Seek knowledge.

The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.

Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized… World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.

By the time 1967 had rolled around, general relativity had been relegated to mathematics departments… in most people’s minds, it bore no relation to physics. And that was mostly because experiments to prove it were so hard to do – all these effects that Einstein’s theory had predicted were infinitesimally small.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

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

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they’re extremely hard to solve. There’s no reason why these problems shouldn’t be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate.

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

Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they’re extremely hard to solve.

I haven’t had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.

I’m obviously attuned to pick up mathematics whenever I can see it. But in Mozart there is a lot of conscious use of mathematical symbolism and numbers in order to try and give messages.

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.

My sister Susan, who was the first one, was pretty good in mathematics and then chess, and my father chose chess because it was easier to measure the results.

I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I’m not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did. I mean, I read books written for laymen, not textbooks or anything.

To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be.

I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one of the most productive ways of making progress.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you’ve got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart’s music the way he played it and how he intended it. You’ve got to make it perfect, and that’s not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

The exact sciences, which would be considered a priori as little adapted to women, for example mathematics, astronomy and physics, are exactly those in which thus far they have most distinguished themselves. This contains a warning against too precipitate conclusions about the intellectual life of woman.

I’m sure that some of them will be very hard and I’ll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me – there’s no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

There’s something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.

When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

I started attending community college when I was 14 or 15, just doing general education stuff like history and mathematics. Then I went on to California State University Long Beach to pursue a degree in journalism. And then I ended up dropping out to found Oculus.

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

There’s actually an awful lot of mathematics that goes into designing a railway, keeping it running, making sure everything runs optimally. Every time you need something to be optimal there’s going to be some mathematics at play.

It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.

Reading music is something that’s inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

My father’s family hails from Banaras. My grandfather taught mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Banaras is also dedicated to Lord Shiva, home to one of the great jyotirlings, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.

I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren’t usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It’s structures and patterns, and that’s what we love, and that’s what we get off on.

If everybody who was in the Forbes 400 said they were going to create 10,000 jobs, by my mathematics, that would be 4 million jobs.

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain’t ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It’s the things people know that ain’t so.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn’t set out to be a businessperson.

Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone’s actions affect everyone else.

There’s something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time.

I believe that schools of today with all their answers on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, above everything else, take us back to the industrial revolution in time, when people thought that nature could be conquered and consumption or production could be unlimited.

People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly, people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that’s such a shame, because I don’t think it’s as hard as people seem to think it is.

How many of you have broken no laws this month? That’s the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee – with physics and mathematics, not with laws – that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.

I like science and mathematics. When I say mathematics, I don’t mean algebra or math in that sense, but the mathematics of things.

Find your self-respect now. Don’t dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It’s so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn’t see any need to go beyond that.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract – and therefore, possibly also the more practical – it becomes.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

The two important variables for the policy formulation are projected inflation and the output gap. There is no clear hidebound mathematics that we must give ‘X’ weight to inflation and ‘Y’ weight to growth and form the associated policy.

I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.

Quantum physics is a bit of a passion of mine. It’s extraordinary. There’s a branch of mathematics that is based on lunacy, and that’s wonderful.

Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

The correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean.

James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he’s good with lower mathematics. Don’t get me wrong – he’s good.

When I got started in my own engineering course, my interest in physics and maths was very high. After all, engineering is all about applied maths and physics. If I were to learn anything further in physics or mathematics, it simply was not there.