Math quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside math — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If somebody is working on a new medicine, computer science helps us model those things. We have a whole group here in Seattle called the Institute for Disease Modelling that is a mix of computer science and math-type people, and the progress we're making in polio or plans for malaria or really driven by their deep insights."
"However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion."
"I cannot judge my work while I am doing it. I have to do as painters do, stand back and view it from a distance, but not too great a distance. How great? Guess."
"All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth."
"We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?"
"Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them."
"As convenient as that would be to make it easier to communicate with more prolific musicians, I don't want to think of music like a math equation."
"Anything we were studying in school, like math, or understanding somebody's behavior outside of school, kind of worked its way into something I could understand by way of a musical experience I'd had or something I'd heard."
"Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally."
"In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects."
"I never thought that others would take my theories so much more seriously than I did."
"But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed."
"To the extent math refers to reality, we are not certain to the extent we are certain, math does not refer to reality."
"Whatever your problems in math are, I assure mine are greater."
"The Prussian Academy of Sciences is a fast-track academic institute that requires a proactive, hands-on-type individual to overthrow the Newtonian conception of the universe. The successful candidate will have an excellent command of mass, energy, space, time and some maths. Bonus paid upon completion of proofs"
"Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities."
"So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century."
"There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel."
"The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning."
"War can protect; it cannot create."
