705 Quotes About Mathematics

Mathematics does furnish the power for deliberate thought and accurate statement, and to speak the truth is one of the most social qualities a person can possess. Gossip, flattery, slander, deceit all spring from a slovenly mind that has not been trained in the power of truthful statement.

In the ordinal view, number is thought as a link in a chain, it is an element of a total order. In the cardinal view, it is rather the mark of a 'pure quantity' obtained through the abstraction of domains of objects having 'the same quantity'. The ordinal number is thought according to the schema of a sequence, the cardinal number, according to that of a measurement.

4.23..If 'thought' means: instance of the subject in a truth-procedure, then there is no thought of this thought, because it contains no knowledge.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

We do not want to count; we want to think the count.

In a way, mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won't ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite. That's why mathematics is really my only interest.

The Golden Number is a mathematical definition of a proportional function which all of nature obeys, whether it be a mollusk shell, the leaves of plants, the proportions of the animal body, the human skeleton, or the ages of growth in man.

If you formulate your question properly, mathematics gives you the answer

If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.