Great Mathematician Quotes & Sayings

So on we tramped, three small dots on a big mountain, mere specks, beings of no importance. In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures. — Ruskin Bond

James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work. — Simon Newcomb

Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing. — Alfred Adler

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician. — Paul Dirac

From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent — Gustave Le Bon

I am exclusively occupied with the problem of gravitation and hope with the help of a local mathematician friend [Marcel Grossman] to overcome all the difficulties. One thing is certain, however, that never in life have I been quite so tormented. A great respect for mathematics has been instilled within me, the subtler aspects of which, in my stupidity, I regarded until now as pure luxury. — Albert Einstein

When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as well to express them so
translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we might also work upon them by experiment? — Michael Faraday

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. — G.H. Hardy

Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!"
"Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused.
"Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win - the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y - this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries. — Catherynne M Valente

Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure.....Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician. — Charles Sorel

Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, he said: I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear. — Edmund Landau

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him. — G.H. Hardy

I have written a book called 'In the Wonderland of Numbers.' It's about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician. — Shakuntala Devi

I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be. — David Lagercrantz

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, he perceived, after waiting a minute, that he held the egg in his hand, and had placed his seconds watch (an instrument of great value on account of its mathematical precision) to boil!
This absence of mind reminds one of the mathematician Ampere, who one day, as he was going to his course of lectures, noticed a little pebble on the road; he picked it up, and examined with admiration the mottled veins. All at once the lecture which he ought to be attending to returned to his mind; he drew out his watch; perceiving that the hour approached, he hastily doubled his pace, carefully placed the pebble in his pocket, and threw his watch over the parapet of the Pont des Arts. — Camille Flammarion

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature. — Graham Greene

One may be an excellent pianist, mathematician, gardener, or scientist and still be cranky and jealous, but in the West one can be considered a great moralist and yet not live by one's moral principles. We must simply recall here the Buddhist requirement that a person and his or her teachings be compatible. Ethics is not like any ordinary science. It must arise from the deepest understanding of human qualities, and such understanding comes only when one undertakes the journey of discovery personally. An ethic that is built exclusively on intellectual ideas and that is not buttressed at every point by virtue, genuine wisdom, and compassion has no solid foundation. — Matthieu Ricard

Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.' — Gian-Carlo Rota

Think of a "discovery" as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery's value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work]. — Nick Bostrom

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. — James Jeans

But unlike most physicists, Marcus eventually learned Lorenz's lesson, that a deterministic system can produce much more than just periodic behavior. He knew to look for wild disorder, and he knew that islands of structure could appear within the disorder. So he brought to the problem of the Great Red Spot an understanding that a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. He could work within an emerging discipline that was creating its own tradition of using the computer as an experimental tool. And he was willing to think of himself as a new kind of scientist: not primarily an astronomer, not a fluid dynamicist, not an applied mathematician, but a specialist in chaos. — James Gleick

A well-known mathematician once told me that the great thing about liking both math and sex was that he could do either one while thinking about the other. — Steven Landsburg

The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess. — Eugene Wigner

To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy. — Frederick The Great

A totally new kind of education is needed in the world. The person who is born to be a poet is proving himself stupid in mathematics and the person who could have been a great mathematician is just cramming history and feeling lost. Everything is topsy-turvy because education is not according to your nature: it does not pay any respect to the individual. It forces everybody into a certain pattern. — Osho

The mathematician of to-day admits that he can neither square the circle, duplicate the cube or trisect the angle. May not our mechanicians, in like manner, be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of that great class of problems with which men can never cope ... I do not claim that this is a necessary conclusion from any past experience. But I do think that success must await progress of a different kind from that of invention. — Simon Newcomb

Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician. — Hermann Hesse

Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books? — J. Arthur Thomson

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal. — Stanislaw Ulam

And when I go around and talk to schools, what I tell the kids are, first of all, you have to accept each other's differences. Some of you are going to be a crappy football player, some of you are going to be a great mathematician. Whatever it is, accept each other's differences and help prop each other up. — Vince Flynn

Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies. — Stefan Banach

The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509. — Midhat Gazale

Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this ... The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents ... Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration ... — Henry John Stephen Smith

The cases of great mathematicians with mental illness have enormous resonance for modern pop writers and filmmakers. This has to do mostly with the writers'/directors' own prejudices and receptivities, which in turn are functions of what you could call our era's particular archetypal template. It goes without saying that these templates change over time. The Mentally Ill Mathematician seems now in some ways to be what the Knight Errant, Mortified Saint, Tortured Artist, and Mad Scientist have been for other eras: sort of our Prometheus, the one who goes to forbidden places and returns with gifts we all can use but he alone pays for. That's probably a bit overblown, at least in some cases. But Cantor fits the template better than most. And the reason for this are a lot more interesting than whatever his problems and symptoms were. — David Foster Wallace

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point. — John Banville

A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. — Henri Poincare

It is the invaluable merit of the great Basle mathematician Leonard Euler, to have freed the analytical calculus from all geometric bounds, and thus to have established analysis as an independent science, which from his time on has maintained an unchallenged leadership in the field of mathematics. — Thomas Reid

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. — Paul R. Halmos