CH 47: Choice Words
Here are some of my favorite quotations pertaining to mathematics; I hope you enjoy them.
William James
The union of the mathematician with the poet,
fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this
surely is the ideal.
David Hilbert
Mathematics knows no races or geographic
boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is
one country.
E. Kasner and J. Newman
Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are
paradoxes in mathematics.
Aristotle
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Walter Bagehot
Life is a school of probability.
Eric Temple Bell
"Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
"It is impossible to be a mathematician without
being a poet in soul."
Blake
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
Lewis Carroll
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said;
"one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay
you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was younger, I always did it for half an
hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many
as six impossible things before breakfast."
Rene Descartes
omnia apud me mathematica fiunt.
With me everything turns into mathematics.
Charles Darwin
Mathematics seems to endow one with something
like a new sense.
Alexander Pope
Order is Heaven's first law.
Benjamin Disraeli
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Freeman Dyson
For a physicist, mathematics is not just a tool
by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is
the main source of concepts and principles by
means of which new theories can be created.
Albert Einstein
Gott wurfelt nicht.
God does not play dice.
Stephen Williams Hawking
God not only plays dice. He also sometimes
throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
Isaac Newton
Hypotheses non fingo.
I feign no hypotheses.
Albert Einstein
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory
of relativity, I do not understand it myself
anymore.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you
expect, even when you take into account
Hofstadter's Law.
Johannes Kepler
Ubi materia, ibi geometria
Where there is matter, there is geometry.
John Locke
...mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and
clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning.
Jules Henri Poincare
Thought is only a flash between two long nights,
but this flash is everything.
Matthew Pordage
One of the endearing things about mathematicians
is the extent to which they will go to avoid doing
any real work.
Seneca
If you would make a man happy, do not add to his
possessions but subtract from the sum of his
desires.
Leo Tolstoy
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what
he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of
himself. The larger the denominator the smaller
the fraction.