Top 30 Mathematicians Quotes

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.

For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.

Mathematicians didn’t invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

Artists realise that mathematicians have a way of looking at the world that can make them see things differently.

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.

I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Mathematicians are born, not made.

I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.

A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.

Most of all, a good maths education encourages students to embrace difficult problems, not shy away from them. In my opinion, the problem is that most UK secondary schools don’t stretch good mathematicians and therefore fail to turn them into excellent mathematicians.

Mathematicians don’t like it when they’re associated with mental illness and sort of bristle when you say that they can’t get along socially, that they’re not good with people.

Most students who take math classes aren’t going to be mathematicians. They’re going to be engineers, statisticians – in many ways, that’s the more important mission of math education.

Mathematicians aren’t satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

The Internet gives you access to a lot of material, and it’s fun to sit and read. I go to something like Wikipedia and look at different topics… I find the subject fascinating. I like to read about concepts and mathematicians.

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

Mathematicians are always playing tricks on each other. They’re always pulling jokes on each other.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems – they love a challenge.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.