41 Quotes About Mathematician

Even a pure mathematician may find his appreciation of this geometry [applied geometry] quickened, since there is no mathematician so pure that he feels no interest at all in the physical world; but, in so far as he succumbs to this temptation, he will be abandoning his purely mathematical position.

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Et peut-être la posterité me saura gré de lui avoir fait connaître que les Anciens n’ont pas tout su. (And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.)

You can recognize a mathematical physicist because he always asks you for your credentials or lists his without you asking for them.

The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen

Non numerantur, sed ponderantur

At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece of work. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obsessive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. "God help me," he thought, "surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician?

Asked some years later how he (Abel) had managed to forge ahead so rapidly to the front rank he replied, “By studying the masters, not their pupils”- a prescription some popular writers of textbooks might do well to mention in their prefaces as an antidote to the poisonous mediocrity of their uninspired pedagogics.

People who are not skilled at mathematics tend to view the output of second-rate mathematicians with an high level of credulity, and attach almost mystical significance to their findings. Bad maths is the palmistry of the twenty-first century.