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Mathematics Quotes

The top contributors are mostly people who wrote about mathematics: Jane Frances McDonnell, G. F. J. Temple, Stanislaw Ulam, Bertrand Russell and Morris Kline. The best-sourced lines, though, are by William Blake, filed here for the word infinity. They include “To see a World in a Grain of Sand” from Auguries of Innocence (1803) and the cleansing of the doors of perception in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).

Three entries are flagged. “Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences” is credited to Galileo and marked misattributed. A line saying the highest form of pure thought is in mathematics is credited to Plato and disputed. So is the claim that the ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate any need for intelligent thought, credited to Alfred North Whitehead.

Random quote on Mathematics

Most quoted on mathematics:

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.

Georg Cantor

This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem.

Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.

William Thomson

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

Pythagoras

All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Even God cannot make two times two not make four.

Hugo Grotius

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

James Jeans The Mysterious Universe (1930)

All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite.

Anaxagoras

There is no doubt that we cannot do without variable quantities in the sense of the potential infinite. But from this very fact the necessity of the actual infinite can be demonstrated.

Georg Cantor

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Stanislaw Ulam Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

Robert Musil Mathematical man (1913)

The Greeks failed to comprehend the infinitely large, the infinitely small, and infinite processes. They "shrank before the silence of the infinite spaces."

Morris Kline Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

The Pythagoreans associated good and evil with the limited and unlimited, respectively.

Morris Kline Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972)

More often than not, a piece of mathematics worked out years before—and believed to be totally without practical value—finds a role in the “real” world.

Ivars Peterson The Mathematical Tourist: New and Updated Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (1998)

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