31 Quotes About Mathematicians

A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.

A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.

We have concluded that the trivial mathematics is, on the whole, useful, and that the real mathematics, on the whole, is not.

A mathematician is an individual who proves his beliefs with equations.

Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were non-rational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists — Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan — Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward.

Steenrod was a careful, methodical man who chose his suits and sports coats according to a mathematical formula and had a mania for thinking up highly logical, if impractical, solutions to social problems like crime.