705 Quotes About Mathematics

How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ... and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education.

The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.

I have absolutely 'Zero' interest in mathematics.

The manner of Demoivre's death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it, he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each day than the preceding one: the day after he had thus reached a total of something over twenty-three hours he slept up to the limit of twenty-four hours, and then died in his sleep.

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.

If you favor the explanation that the 'O' was devised by the Greeks without reference to their alphabet, its arbitrariness is lessened by noticing how often nature supplies us with circular hollows: from an open mouth to the faintly outlined dark of the moon; from craters to wounds. 'Skulls and seeds and all good things are round,' wrote Nabokov.

We certainly are an odd bunch.""Yes. Seven people. Odd.

What," Pattern said with a hum, "is a chaperone?" "That is someone who watches two young people when they are together, to make certain they don't do anything inappropriate." "Inappropriate?" Pattern said. "Such as...dividing by zero?

Mathematics is just a language of instruction.