Math Humor Quotes & Sayings

No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks. — Isaac Newton

That's a pretty serious club, requiring tattoos. I thought only math club did that. - Jayke to Amber- — Shawn Keenan

Surely this marked a new level of achievement in his amatory career. Never before had he charmed the frock off a woman with talk of mathematics. Never before would he have thought to try. — Tessa Dare

Do you mean ter tell me," he growled at the Dursleys, "that this boy - this boy! - knows nothin' abou' - about ANYTHING?"
Harry thought this was going a bit far. He had been to school, after all, and his marks weren't bad.
"I know some things," he said. "I can, you know, do math and stuff. — J.K. Rowling

My sub doesn't pay for me," he says, pulling me to my feet. "That just doesn't happen."
"But we ordered so much," I say helplessly.
"It made you happy," he says simply. "Now I get to play with you. And that makes me happy."
"I don't think it's that simple an equation."
"Maybe not," he concedes. "But then, if if sex were the same thing as math, a lot more people would be lining up to take calculus. — Nenia Campbell

Matt laughed. "Close. That was last year. This year it's Obsessive Deovtion to Fourier Analysis Theory and Applications. And my personal favorite, Quantum Physics II: Romantic Entanglements of Energy and Matter."
Julie turned her head to Matt. "You're a double major? Physics and math? Jesus ... "
"I know. Nerdy." He shrugged.
"No, I'm impressed. I'm just surprised your brains fit in your head."
"I was fitted with a specially desinged compression filter that allows excessive information to lie dormant until I need to access it. It's only the Beta version, so excuse any kinks that may appear. I really can't be held responsible. — Jessica Park

[Harriet] hated math. She hated math with every bone in her body. She spent so much time hating it that she never had time to do it. — Louise Fitzhugh

Shebna scraped the tablet clean and began drawing circles in the soft clay. "Suppose you had six figs and you ate two. How many would
"
"Four." Hezekiah answered before Shebna finished, and the tutor's thick black eyebrows rose in surprise.
"And suppose I had five figs. How many would we
"
"Nine."
"Have you done this before?"
Hezekiah thought the question was ridiculous. "I've eaten figs lots of times. — Lynn Austin

I care. They bother me. And that's why I'm stupid. That makes me exponentially more stupid than stupid. I'm stupid to the power of stupid. — Kami Garcia

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people. — Augusten Burroughs

I was a giant fan of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway' in high school, and I was obsessed with Jim Carrey and cut out any picture of Jim Carrey that ever came in any kind of magazine. I put it all over my walls. At the time, I thought humor was just repeating lines from 'Ace Ventura' ad nauseum in the back of my advanced math class. — Jordan Klepper

Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, "God, it's cold."
Question: What's the probability they will kiss? — Jenny Downham

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five ... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards. — John Green

What did we know? This was early days. We had no idea what was out there. How dangerous it might be. It was just a school maths problem. They never asked that in the exams, did they? Like, If John walks at three miles an hour from London to Brighton, and he's attacked by rabid grown-ups four times, and they bite his right leg off, how long will it take him to bleed to death? — Charlie Higson

Only in math can you buy sixty cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you. — Charles M. Schulz

Applied war is where the money's at. I don't mean that figuratively. Defense is 140% of the UVE budget. Offense is twice that. This is possible because there is no budget for math education. — Zach Weinersmith

So what were your favorite subjects in school?"
"School?" He leaned back in his chair as though he needed the extra space to think about it. "Probably math. It always made sense. Unlike English, economics, and girls."
"And exactly how do you plan on taking over the free world if you don't understand economics?"
"I'll hire advisers. I'll hire you, in fact."
"Okay. Let me know when your army of junior high zombies is ready. — Janette Rallison

If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy) ... — Doug Pierce

I still wouldn't be able to control myself around him, and I'm math geek enough to know that equation doesn't work out. — Robin Brande

Monty Jones: Dad, is there a word to describe answers that are completely correct but entirely useless under the circumstances?
Professor Jones: Yes, yes there is. — David Morgan-Mar

Really, there was only one problem with Mr. Davis, as far as Gregory was concerned; He taught math. — Greg Pincus

It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem. — Mark Kac

I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance. — Maureen Johnson

MY FRIEND: SO DO YOU TAKE A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASS?
ME: SURE DO HAVE BEEN FOR THE LAST 13 YEARS.
MY FRIEND: COOL WHAT LANGUAGE?
ME: MATH. — KanyaACoffman

Mom actually said that?" Cassie's face shown with happiness. "She always hated my math!"
"Nah," Martin said. "She was just being that way for you. She thought it was what you needed to hear. If parents told us what they really think about stuff, we could figure them out like regular people. — Clare B. Dunkle

Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected. — Edward Griffith Begle

Personally, I think sex should be like math.
At school.
No one really cares if they're crap at math. They even proclaim it. They'll say to anyone, "Yeah, I don't mind science and English, but I'm absolutely shithouse at math." And other people will laugh and say,"Yeah, me too. I would have a clue about all that logarithm shit. You should be able to say that about sex too.
You should be proudly able to say, "Yeah I wouldn't have a clue about all that orgasm shit, ay. I'm okay at everything else but when it comes to that part I wouldn't have a clue. — Markus Zusak

Q and Beanpole and I giggled at the way our math teacher, Mr. Sung-Li, wore four pencils in his shirt pocket in case he was suddenly attacked by a multiplication problem or something. — Alan Sitomer

What's your angle?" I asked, trying to sound more playful than demanding.
"Isosceles," Jack quipped. — Amanda Hocking

My job is to draw little points on little graphs and to derive little information. — Anonymous

Calculus was not math. It was a fucking science experiment gone wrong. — Abbi Glines

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers. — R.M. ArceJaeger

In geometry, whenever we had to find the area of a circle, pi * radius squared, I would get really hungry for pie. Square pie. — Dan Florence

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between. — George Polya

New Rule: Food companies must face the facts: One container equals one serving. Look, we're Americans, and that means once we open the bag, there's no stopping us until we're licking stray bits of powdered cheese off the carpet. So stop trying to give us nutritional information based on a fraction of the package. It assumes a talent for two things that we're really not capable of: restraint and math. — Bill Maher

A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm. — Tim Dorsey

Not only can I teach you math, I can teach you math in bed, Jordan. You know, I'll add the bed, you subtract the clothes, you divide the legs, and I'll multiply — Miranda Kenneally

Wherefore, I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself to see the desolation wrought. — Mark Twain

Lynn, she saved half our faction from this stuff," says Marlene, tapping the bandage on her arm from where the Dauntless traitors shot her. "Well, half of half of our faction."
"In some circles they call that a quarter, Mar," Lynn says. — Veronica Roth

On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.) — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

For large values of 1, 1 approaches 2, for small values of 2. — Keith Caserta

This phrase did not have the ring of verisimilitude because I am famously bad at math. If I'm in charge of tipping at a restaurant, the waiter will either fall to his knees in gratitude or slash my tires. There ain't no Mr. In Between. — Celia Rivenbark

Anyway.
I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane. — Richard Hamming

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane. — J.Williard Gibbs

People love to admit they have bad handwriting or that they can't do math. And they will readily admit to being awkward: 'I'm such a klutz!' But they will never admit to having a poor sense of humor or being a bad driver. — George Carlin

Math. It's your favorite subject. Which surprises you. Last year your teacher tried to convince you that you had a real "aptitude" for math, but all you got in the end was a B minus. The truth is you weren't even trying. But then you got low Cs and Ds in all your other classes and you weren't trying there, either, so maybe you are good at math after all.
You like it because either you're right or you're wrong. Not like social studies and definitely not like English, where you always have to explain your answers and support your opinions. With math it's right or it's wrong and you're done with it. But even that's changing, my teacher said now you have to explain how you solved the problem and support your answer, saying that having the right answer isn't as important as explaining how you got it and bam, just like that, you hate math. — Charles Benoit

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences? — Gian-Carlo Rota

You're probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone's better at math than I am, but it's okay, I'm fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things - guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few. — Jennifer Niven

I think you mother has Asperger's," Georgie had said to Neal.
"They didn't get Asperger's int he '50s."
"I'm just saying maybe she's on the the spectrum."
"She's just a math teacher. — Rainbow Rowell

But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two. — A.A. Milne

Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x. — Andrew Sturm

The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events. — Gian-Carlo Rota

100% of the people who give 110% do not understand math. — Demetri Martin

You can fuck your math teacher but you can't fuck math. — Scott Sigler

90% of the game is half mental. — Yogi Berra

Now Eli was my new neighbor. Which was fine with me because I sucked at Math. Math and I were not on speaking terms. — Shelly Crane

I've sort of been slacking off in my voodoo studies.I've trigonometry, you know? — Kendare Blake

The risk I took was calculated, but, man, am I bad at math! — Unknown

She says Ariel is going to interview me after she's done and he's going to ask me how many golf balls can fit into a stretch limo, and the right answer is to make reasonable estimates on the spot, maybe say, "It's probably like 100 golf balls high by 60 golf balls wide by 1,000 golf balls long," and to look like I'm thinking really hard, and then just do the math in my head and give him the answer. I ask, "Out of curiosity, what would a wrong answer be?" She says, "Freaking out about the question. — David Shapiro

This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [ ... ] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like "unreal"? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well. — Orson Scott Card

Can I just say that I don't care if two planes or trains or whatever take off from different locations at different times and travel at different speeds. I am not traffic control, so why the hell would I care what time they'd pass each other? — Devon Ashley

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. — Neal Stephenson

Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that "women aren't funny." Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups. — Tina Fey

{Replying to G. H. Hardy's suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was 'dull', showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius}

No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways, the two ways being 13 + 123 and 93 + 103. — Srinivasa Ramanujan

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. — Augustine Of Hippo

My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, 'Fifty is the new forty!' Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as bad as I do. No. Fifty is fifty. — Celia Rivenbark

There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else
but persistent. — Raoul Bott

Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts. — Anonymous

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry. — Jonathan Evison

And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical
because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Late twenties, single, female. Do the math.
Flirty flings were fabulous until you hit the big three-O, all downhill
from there. Biological clocks started ticking like time bombs waiting to
detonate, gravity exerted more force on your life than your mom, and
suddenly, the dog-ugliest creep looked like Jake Gyllenhaal. — Nicola Marsh

...the thing about dieting is that it's really horrible and boring for a longer period of time than feeling pretty in small jeans feels. That's just basic math. — Brittany Gibbons