Browsing Topic Best Math Quotes

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.

Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.

Mathematics is a language

Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.

… 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.

Those who do not know history are probably also not doing well in English or math. P.J. O’Rourke

Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man.

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

Activism is setting a goal of something you would like to be different, and figuring out what would have to change to achieve that goal. It’s sort of like math.

Numbers rule the universe.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

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

Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime.

I’ll always write about what’s going on in my life and the reason for that is it’s not actually because I’m so fascinated with myself, it’s because I can’t think. I can’t think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It’s like math for me.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new… the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad.

If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.

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.

Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, because they want to comprehend at a glance and are not used to seeking for first principles. Those, on the other hand, who are accustomed to reason from first principles do not understand matters of feeling at all, because they look for first principles and are unable to comprehend at a glance.

The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere … yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

What destroys more self-confidence than any other educational thing in America is being assigned to some remedial math when you get into some college, and then it’s not taught very well and you end up with this sense of, ‘Hey, I can’t really figure those things out.’

There is number of different efforts around the country are to try to redesign the math pathway and the courses that students have to take to make it more applicable to the real world.

You know, students who major in elementary education – they’re going to be grade school teachers – they have the highest rates of math anxiety of any college major. And they bring that into the classroom. So you find students being introduced to math concepts by teachers who may have not only a lack of training but also a lack of enthusiasm about math.

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.

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

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.