Math Quotes - Page 27

To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion − not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creation is up to.

To be a scholar of mathematics you must be born with talent, insight, concentration, taste, luck, drive and the ability to visualize and guess.

Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality. That is that entire universe is made of matter, obviously. And matter is made of particles. It's made of electrons and neutrons and protons. So the entire universe is made out of particles. Now what are the particles made out of They're not made out of anything. The only thing you can say about the reality of an electron is to cite its mathematical properties. So there's a sense in which matter has completely dissolved and what is left is just a mathematical structure.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.

You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you'll have to run much faster.

One of the big misapprehensions about mathematics that we perpetrate in our classrooms is that the teacher always seems to know the answer to any problem that is discussed. This gives students the idea that there is a book somewhere with all the right answers to all of the interesting questions, and that teachers know those answers. And if one could get hold of the book, one would have everything settled. That's so unlike the true nature of mathematics.

I certainly do care about measuring educational results. But what is an 'educational result?' The twinkling eyes of my students, together with their heartfelt and beautifully expressed mathematical arguments are all the results I need.

Calculators can only calculate - they cannot do mathematics.

Mathematics is much more than computation with pencil and a paper and getting answers to routine exercises. In fact, it can easily be argued that computation, such as doing long division, is not mathematics at all. Calculators can do the same thing and calculators can only calculate they cannot do mathematics.

The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying.

If you understand something, you understand that it is obvious.

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

You are the mountain and the valley.

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

The only teaching that a professor can give, in my opinion, is that of thinking in front of his students.

Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.

A mathematics teacher is a midwife to ideas.

In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

There is no problem that cannot be solved.

Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.

The interaction between math and physics is a two-way process, with each of the two subjects drawing from and inspiring the other. At different times, one of them may take the lead in developing a particular idea, only to yield to the other subject as focus shifts. But altogether, the two interact in a virtuous circle of mutual influence.