Top 111 Mathematical Quotes

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.

Among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other, and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.

For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.

Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.

Here at Wisconsin we didn’t get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the ’60s.

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

Eccentric doesn’t bother me. ‘Eccentric’ being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn’t follow the lines – that’s okay.

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.

The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

As long as there is a mathematical chance, we have to keep on going.

There’s nothing really connecting the behavior of the Nile, metallurgy, and the behavior of prices except that I had the mathematical tools to explain them.

In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions.

Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be ‘taught‘ to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which is being dishonestly subjected to counterintuitive methods.

I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren’t equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it’s just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

There’s never been a mathematical equation that says a good experience making a movie equates to a good movie, or a bad experience on a set is going to lead to a bad movie.

Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic.

Each part of our genome is unique. We would not be alive if there was not a single mathematical solution for our chromosomes. We would just be scrambled goo.

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge – which is mathematical, essentially – can have a playful visual element to it.

The building blocks of mathematical thinking are requisite for more advanced conceptualization. If a student is not ready to move on, then the teacher must take time to assist that learner.

One of the pleasing things about science is that we do all climb towards the heavens on the shoulders of our predecessors. Economics, like physics, has its heroes, and the letter ‘H’ that I used in my mathematical equations was not there to honor Sir William Hamilton, but rather Harold Hotelling.

In terms of merit, sports has mathematical statistics. That’s how you know who the best player is.

There has to be a mathematical explanation for how bad that tie is.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.

I perceive myself as rather uninhibited, with a certain mathematical facility and more interest in the broad aspect of a problem than the delicate nuances. I am more interested in discovering what is over the next rise than in assiduously cultivating the beautiful garden close at hand.

We have overcome the notion that mathematical truths have an existence independent and apart from our own minds. It is even strange to us that such a notion could ever have existed.

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

The shining star in the world is Shanghai. That’s what CEOs from big companies say – ‘if I want mathematical analytical work done, it’s done in China.’

We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the ‘hard‘ sciences so brilliantly successful.

I’m not sure whether it counts as a talent, but I love playing ‘Magic: The Gathering.’ It’s mathematical and intellectually challenging, and makes me feel nostalgic for when I played as a kid.

Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there’s a multitude of different endings.

I don’t believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it’s complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

There’s a mathematical way to get success.

The special sphere of finance within economics is the study of allocation and deployment of economic resources, both spatially and across time, in an uncertain environment. To capture the influence and interaction of time and uncertainty effectively requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools.

To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena.

Indeed, it is a proven mathematical theorem that a doughnut is topologically distinct from a sphere.

The Swedish style of songwriting is so mathematical.

From Roger Bacon, the 13th century Franciscan who pioneered the scientific method, to George Lemaitre, the 20th century Belgian priest who first developed a mathematical foundation for the ‘Big Bang,’ people of faith have played a key role in advancing scientific understanding.

I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.

Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.

No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.

I am a Leaper: a person who – thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago – is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn’t exist three out of four years.

There’s barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn’t had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting.

I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law.

I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you’re forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else.

In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse on London‘s seafront popular among underwriters, men in powdered wigs with mathematical minds and steely constitutions who offered to compensate owners if their boats were lost at sea.

I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no man can hasten or retard.

You almost can’t avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe.

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don’t understand. A single ‘neuron’ in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

The big mathematical challenge for flying robots is making them move in six dimensions: x, y, z, pitch, yaw and roll. We create 3-D obstacle courses in the lab – windows, doors, hula-hoops taped to posts – and ask the robots to fly through. It looks like a Harry Potter Quidditch match.

The orthodox believers in God are divided into two camps, one of which maintains that the existence of God is as demonstrable as any mathematical proposition, while the other asserts that his existence is not demonstrable to the intellect.

The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

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.

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

Gamers have this tendency to turn games into mathematical equations, breaking them into lists of components like ‘presentation‘ and ‘mechanics‘ and judging each one on its own merits.

The universal medicine for the Soul is the Supreme Reason and Absolute Justice; for the mind, mathematical and practical Truth; for the body, the Quintessence, a combination of light and gold.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!

Bitcoin may herald the dawning of a new age in currency. It holds superior traits as a form of ‘good money.’ As a tangible form of asset (its core tangibility being its mathematical basis), it could become an incredibly important building block for the 21st century’s global economy.

Wind depends on temperature. Temperature depends on pressure. And pressure depends on wind. It’s an intricate mathematical tapestry that is far too intertwined to unpick by hand.

To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me to be like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers.

I listen to things that are popular and try to think about it in a mathematical way.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.

The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.

My brother is a genius. When we went to Italy, he was on the local television channel as a prodigy, who could solve very sophisticated mathematical equations. He was only seven or eight years old but he could solve mathematical problems for fourteen year olds.

I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but I don’t have a mathematical brain.

When you have different kinds of scientific and mathematical minds approaching problems, you will get more solutions. This leads to more innovation and more creative design.

Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

I hope no man takes what I said about the living and dieing of men for mathematical demonstration.

I write in a mathematical manner. For some of my songs, I rhyme every syllable. It’s a science.

Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply ‘given,’ elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last ‘generalist’ in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching.

We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.

Some people are great at the pure mathematical things – like Bill Gates, he’s great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

On the mathematical side, you could in principle build a society in which people were fulfilling their needs and flourishing as human beings in a higher way than in a consumer society, provided you had the right investments in the opportunity to flourish in less materialistic ways.

Things like the financial markets – a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts… it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.

I approach an action sequence almost like a mathematical problem. Sometimes you get these action sequences that you read and go, ‘Oh my God, this is huge, how do I do it?’ and I go, ‘Just a step at a time. Sit down and plot each piece of it out.’

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

I’m always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.

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.

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.

If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?

The most important single thing about string theory is that it’s a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That’s big news.

I’m very attracted to schematic structures. My brother is a chemical engineer, he has a very mathematical mind, and he’s also a visual artist. I think we have a lot in common. And my first film had a very tight structure, narratively.

I’ve always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.

Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes.

I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar‘s time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

I have my hopes, & very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations: in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of the brain (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world).

The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

Whatever may be the merits of a religious system, its effects upon the mass of mankind must depend in an important degree upon its teachers. All instruction and all truth, except simple mathematical truth, is modified by the medium through which it is conveyed.