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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:

War as a whole, and each operation taken separately, are first of all mathematics and calculations.

Vasily Blyukher

While there is nothing Vedic in “Vedic mathematics”, there is church dogma in formal mathematics.

C. K. Raju

In the Greek world mathematics was more closely related to philosophy than to practical affairs, and this kinship has persisted to the present day.

Carl Benjamin Boyer A History of Mathematics (1968)

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 Hemingway

Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing—kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich.

Robert A. Heinlein Off the Main Sequence (2005)

I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics.

Julius Sumner Miller The Days of My Life : An Autobiography (1989)

To discover something in mathematics is to overcome an inhibition and a tradition. You cannot move forward if you are not subversive.

Laurent Schwartz Un mathematicien aux prises avec le siecle (1997)

5. We come to know about mathematics by abstracting structure from the world around us and focusing on the structure of Being mirrored in us.

Jane Frances McDonnell The Pythagorean World (2016)

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

G. H. Hardy A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Greek mathematics reveals an important aspect of the Greek genius of which the student of Greek culture is apt to lose sight.

Thomas Little Heath A History of Greek Mathematics (1921)

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

John Adams

Project Orion
In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

Stanislaw Ulam

Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics.

Doron Zeilberger

I trust the clergy are not involved in this problem. They‘re notoriously unscientific. One can‘t attack them with mathematics.

S. S. Van Dine The Bishop Murder Case (1929)

Mathematics was not just about keeping track of were the moon was going, but also where the money was going.

David Orrell The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

I loved mathematics and science-related subjects.

Francisca Oboh Ikuenobe

A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspect of reality: statistics.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Tantra is a very very poetic approach, not arithmetical. And tantra believes in love, not in mathematics. It believes in sudden enlightenment.

Rajneesh

6. Mathematics is applicable because it truly describes the fundamental structure of reality.

Jane Frances McDonnell The Pythagorean World (2016)

Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Bertrand Russell Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)

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