Words matter. These are the best Mathematicians Quotes from famous people such as Edsger Dijkstra, Margaret Wertheim, E. T. Bell, Terence Tao, Henri Poincare, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
Most students who take math classes aren’t going to be mathematicians. They’re going to be engineers, statisticians – in many ways, that’s the more important mission of math education.
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects.
The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
Mathematicians didn’t invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.
Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.
Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They’ll tell you they don’t need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they’re like little children.
We need scientists and mathematicians explaining why they are excited about their subjects but also why they are important for solving social problems, informing political debate and for the economy.
Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.
After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book, ‘Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,’ published in 1944.
A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.
Most of all, a good maths education encourages students to embrace difficult problems, not shy away from them. In my opinion, the problem is that most UK secondary schools don’t stretch good mathematicians and therefore fail to turn them into excellent mathematicians.
Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
Mathematicians don’t like it when they’re associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can’t get along socially, that they’re not good with people.
Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.
The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.
Mathematicians always like a deceptively difficult problem.
As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn’t effective unless you had a journal. That’s about all I know.
When I first began studying prices, it wasn’t a topic that mathematicians were working on. Purely by accident, I saw a set of data on price changes presented in a lecture and realized they behaved similarly to the geometric models I was already studying.
Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders.
So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians.
I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.
The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.
The work of mathematicians on ‘pure’ problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.
Mathematicians are born, not made.
Mathematicians are like managers – they want improvement without change.
