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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:

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience.

Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.

Felix Klein Anwendung der Differential-und Integralrechnung auf Geometrie (1920)

There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.

Saul Kripke

Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001)

There is no religious denomination in which so much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical expressions as in mathematics.

Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value (1977)

Magick, mysticism, and the mathematics are triplets.

Aleister Crowley The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929)

Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.

Douglas Adams

Nature doth, and in it alone is discovered an infinite wisdom, so that Divine Wisdom may be concluded to be infinitely infinite.

Galileo Galilei Dialogo sopra i Due Massi Sistemi del Mondo (1632)

All this arguing of infinities is but the ambition of school boys.

Thomas Hobbes

I would rather discover a single [geometrical] demonstration than become king of the Persians.

Democritus

Math is perfect (in principle), but mathematicians are not (because they are humans), hence the mathematics that (human) mathematicians do is influenced by the weltanschauung of the people around them.

Doron Zeilberger Computerized Deconstruction. Appeared in Adv. Appl. Math. v. 31 (2003)

Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness Companion encyclopedia of the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences (2003)

The history of Alexandrian mathematics begins with the Elements of Euclid and closes with the Algebra of Diophantus, both of which are founded on the discoveries of several preceding centuries.

James Gow A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

Jorge Luis Borges Discussion (1932)

God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

Gian-Carlo Rota

Mathematics is the science of the infinite, its goal the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is finite, means.

Hermann Weyl The Open World: Three Lectures on the Metaphysical Implications of Science (1932)

A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?

Martin Gardner

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable sub-human who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough For Love (1973)

In the history of mathematics, the "how" always preceded the "why," the technique of the subject preceded its philosophy.

Tobias Dantzig Number: The Language of Science (1930)

Nearly always it is the recondite and complicated which is elaborated first; and it is only when some relatively unsophisticated mind attacks a problem that its deep simplicity is revealed.

Eric Temple Bell The Development of Mathematics (1940)

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