Mathematician quotes:

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A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- Paul Erdos
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. -- Sofia Kovalevskaya
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. -- G. H. Hardy
Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work. -- Leonardo da Vinci
A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory. -- Paul Erdos
I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. -- Steven Strogatz
Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut. -- Molly Antopol
Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another. -- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry. -- Jonathan Evison
Mathematicians are born, not made. -- Henri Poincare
Mathematics is written for mathematicians. -- Nicolaus Copernicus
God is an awesome mathematician and physicist. -- Francis Collins
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects. -- Henri Poincare
If there is a God, he's a great mathematician. -- Paul Dirac
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful. -- G. H. Hardy
It is easier to square a circle than to get round a mathematician. -- Augustus De Morgan
You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers. -- John Forbes Nash, Jr.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. -- Havelock Ellis
It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth. -- Daniel Bernoulli
One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies. -- Stefan Banach
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more. -- Albert Einstein
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. -- Charles Darwin
My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician. -- David Chalmers
It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants. -- Samuil Shatunovsky
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. -- William James
All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics. -- Martin Gardner
[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle. -- Evan Esar
The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician. -- James C. Maxwell
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. -- G. H. Hardy
There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician. -- Daniel Bernoulli
A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. -- Stefan Banach
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. -- James Joseph Sylvester
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language. -- Jacques Derrida
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean. -- G. H. Hardy
The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about. -- Clifford Geertz
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. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since. -- Noam Chomsky
I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered. -- David Chalmers
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. -- Shakuntala Devi
Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. -- Leonhard Euler
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. -- Tom Stoppard
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. -- Saint Augustine
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created. -- Eric Kandel
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. -- G. H. Hardy
I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible. -- Carl Friedrich Gauss
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. -- Marston Morse
In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is. -- Alfred Adler
Over the years, I would go to my agents, my manager, and I would say, 'Hey, there's this amazing true story about this gay English mathematician who committed suicide in the 1950s.' And they would be like, 'Please don't ever write that script. That is an unmakeable film.' -- Graham Moore
And when I go around and talk to schools, what I tell the kids are, first of all, you have to accept each other's differences. Some of you are going to be a crappy football player, some of you are going to be a great mathematician. Whatever it is, accept each other's differences and help prop each other up. -- Vince Flynn
I used to be really cute. I could send you earlier photos where I'm stunning. But I've gained about twenty pounds over the past two years, and the more weight I've put on, the more success I've had. If you drew a diagram of weight gain and me getting more work, a mathematician would draw some conclusions from that. -- Zach Galifianakis
We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of science are mathematics and logic; the mathematical set puts out the logical eye, the logical set puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it sees better with one eye than with two. Note that De Morgan, himself, only had sight with only one eye. -- Augustus De Morgan
The library is the mathematician's laboratory. -- Paul Halmos
Am I really a good mathematician? -- Norbert Wiener
An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator. -- Isaac Barrow
I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer. -- Philip Emeagwali
I'm no mathematician, so I'm stuck with the graphic representations. -- Hugh Hopper
Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician. -- Jerry Buss
Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men. -- Andre Weil
Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself. -- Arthur Eddington
I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist. -- Alan Greenspan
Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. -- Arthur Eddington
I'm a mathematician because I'm too slow to be a writer. -- Jack Edmonds
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. -- G. H. Hardy
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. -- Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch
Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa. -- Henri Poincare
I'm a mathematician by education, but I have this other thing. A gut instinct. -- Glen Taylor
Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism". -- G. H. Hardy
Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong. -- Hermann Weyl
To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician. -- Bertrand Russell
A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician. -- Brahmagupta
A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science. -- Bill Gaede
You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.' -- Catherine Hardwicke
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician. -- Samuel Johnson
The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty. -- Bertrand Russell
If anything runs deeper than a mathematician's love of variables, it's a scientist's love of constants. -- Sam Kean
A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane. -- J. Willard Gibbs
A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician. -- Karl Weierstrass
It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her. -- Steven Weinberg
The mathematician is entirely free, within the limits of the imagination, to construct what worlds he pleases. -- J. W. N. Sullivan
A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The mathematician knows some things, no doubt, but not those things one usually wants to get from him. -- Albert Einstein
Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation. -- Catherynne M. Valente
A mathematician is anï»¿ individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. -- Bill Gaede
There's nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right to your face. -- Marjorie Benton Cooke
Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician. -- Gottlob Frege
The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester. -- Joel Henry Hildebrand
Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination. -- Leonard Koppett
It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician. -- Karl Weierstrass
The one [the logician] studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other [the mathematician] the science which draws necessary conclusions. -- Charles Sanders Peirce
It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs. -- Aristotle
Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician. -- Robert M. Hutchins
In India, I learned a proverb that says, 'Distrust the calculation seven times over, the mathematician a hundred times.' -- Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza
From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. -- James Jeans
The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth. -- George Bernard Shaw
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other. -- George Eliot
Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it. -- Leo Tolstoy
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game -- G. H. Hardy
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all. -- Edgar Allan Poe
The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing stock from a mathematician's point of view. -- Roger Bacon
Bertrand Russell started off as a mathematician and then degenerated into a philosopher and finally into a humanist; he went downhill rapidly! -- Gregory Chaitin
The whole thing that makes a mathematicianâ??s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues. -- Donald Knuth
The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof, but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by GUESSING. -- George Polya
Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair. -- Steven G. Krantz
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- Norbert Wiener
A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye. -- Bill Gaede
The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman. -- Francois Arago
The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying. -- Jean Dieudonne
A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction. -- Bill Gaede
Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays. -- Philip J. Davis
This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein
This is a question too difficult for a mathematician. It should be asked of a philosopher"(when asked about completing his income tax form) -- Albert Einstein
That's my mathematician who examines problems which I put before him and checks their validity. You see, I am not myself a good mathematician. -- Albert Einstein
A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process. -- B. F. Skinner
... the atlas is a manifold. This is a typical mathematician's use of the word "is", and should not be confused with the normal use. -- Timothy Gowers
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time. -- E. O. Wilson
As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen. -- Paul Dirac
When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask. -- Paul Halmos
I knew a mathematician who said 'I do not know as much as God. But I know as much as God knew at my age'. -- Milton Shulman

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