31 Quotes About Mathematicians

Viewed one way, then, for at least five years between 1904 and 1909, Ramanujan floundered- mostly out of school, without a degree, without contact with other mathematicians. And yet, was the cup half-empty or half-full?

The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.

The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.

It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an “optimization problem.