Dictionary Home » Famous Quotes » mathematics

mathematics quotes

  • All science requires mathematics†the knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us†this is the easiest of sciences. A fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it. For laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

    - Roger known as Doctor Mirabilis Bacon
      Opus Majus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

  • Mathematics is the door and key to the sciences.

    - Roger known as Doctor Mirabilis Bacon
      Opus Majus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

  • All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.

    - SirThomas Browne
      The Garden of Cyrus, ch.5.

  • Entre le pe  nis et les mathe  matiques†il n'existe rien. Rien! Between the penis and mathematics†there's nothing. Nothing!

    -Destouches
      Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of Night, translated by John H P Marks,1960).

  • EDUCATION.At Mr Wackford Squeers's Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge inYorkshire.Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, providedwith all necessaries, instructed inall languages, living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every other branch of classical literature. Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^9  Nicholas Nickleby, ch.3.

  • As faras the laws of mathematics refer to reality, theyare not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

    - Albert Einstein
    Quoted in Fritjof Capra The Tao of Physics (1975), ch.2.

  • Vanite   desVanite  s;Vanite   de la ge  ome  trie. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of mathematics!

    - the Great Frederick II
      Letter to Voltaire, 25  Jan, protesting against the increasing use of mathematical calculation in engineering projects, which he saw as theory triumphing over practical experience.

  • Beauty isthe first test: there isno permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

    - Godfrey Harold Hardy
    A Mathematician's  Apology.

  • [There is] a delusion that macro-economics is both viableanduseful (a delusionencouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists).

    - Friedrich August von Hayek
      The Fatal Conceit:  The Errors of Socialism, ch.6.

  • It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Letter, 23  Jul.

  • All creative people hate mathematics. It's the most uncreative subject you can study.

    - SirAlec (AlexanderArnold Constantine) Issigonis
    Recalled on his death. Quoted in The Australian, 5 Oct1988.

  • In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize†only be sure always to call it please 'research'.

    -Tom (Thomas Andrew) Lehrer
      'Lobachevski', satirical song.

  • There are two ways to teach mathematics.One is to take real pains toward creating understandingvisual aids, that sort of thing. The other is the old British style of teaching until you're blue in the face.

    -James R Newman
      Quoted in the NewYork Times, 30 Sep.

  • Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.

    -Plato
    c.380  BC  Inscription over the door of theAcademy at Athens.

  • Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beautya beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

    - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
      The Principles of Mathematics.

  • The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

    - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
      Mysticism and Logic.

  • Angling may be saidtobe so likemathematics, that itcan never be fully learnt.

    - Izaak Walton
      The Compleat Angler,'Epistle to the Reader'.

  • Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

    - Alfred North Whitehead
      ScienceAnd the ModernWorld.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learn more about mathematics

Related Articles

link/cite print suggestion box