Math Quotes - Page 5

Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.

I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

But just as much as it is easy to find the differential [derivative] of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential. Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not.

If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy.

He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.

Wherever there is number, there is beauty.

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

The more I work and practice, the luckier I seem to get.

It was as though applied mathematics was my spouse, and pure mathematics was my secret lover.

We are justified in calling numbers a free creation of the human mind.

The best way to learn is to do; the worst way to teach is to talk.

My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.

Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.

... it can often be profitable to try a technique on a problem even if you know in advance that it cannot possibly solve the problem completely.

Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.