Quotes on math
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
Bacon, Roger
I know that two and two make four - & should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
Gordon, George
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
Leibniz, Gottfried
The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
Gibbon, Edward
For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Bacon, Roger
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.
Bateson, Gregory
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
Bell, Eric
The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.
Euclid
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
Neumann, John Louis von
The different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
Carroll, Lewis
Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.
Bridgman, Percy William
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
Anglin, W.S.
Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that?
Carroll, Lewis
Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.
Dantzig, Tobias
With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.
Pastoret, Phil
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Sandburg, Carl
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Erdos, Paul
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i. e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed...[However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
From Applied Optics
But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.
Morse, Harold Marston
So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
Bacon, Francis
One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers.
Hertz, Heinrich
Trigonometry is a sine of the times.
Unknown, Author