Quotes & Sayings About Math

Algebra is generous; she often gives more than is asked of her. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics - at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math typically focuses on learning procedures to solve highly stereotyped problems. Professional mathematicians think a certain way to solve real problems, problems that can arise from the everyday world, or from science, or from within mathematics itself. The key to success in school math is to learn to think inside-the-box. In contrast, a key feature of mathematical thinking is thinking outside-the-box - a valuable ability in today's world. — Keith Devlin

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

I'd always been the confident guy in school. I was good in math and English, but I was still shy. I couldn't get up and speak in front of people. I was asked to do it when I was 10 years old and I burst out crying. — Chris Vance

When I cook with my son, I might chop vegetables and have fun with different shapes. Cooking is a way to teach kids about other things, like reading or math with all of the weights and measures. There are so many things that are part of cooking that are also very educational. — Emeril Lagasse

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture. — Brian Greene

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

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists. — M.C. Escher

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.
(Recalling the degree of focus and determination that eventually yielded the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.) — Andrew John Wiles

Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.' — David Harsanyi

We have to start encouraging women to get into math and science early on in life ... But to just say TechCrunch is perpetuating the problem because there aren't enough women speakers at our events is just a way to get attention and not solve the problem. So do we want to solve the problem, or do we want to just pick on me? — Michael Arrington

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

The real work of us mathematicians, from now until, roughly, fifty years from now, when computers won't need us anymore, is to make the transition from human-centric math to machine-centric math as smooth and efficient as possible. — Doron Zeilberger

A hit show takes Hollywood magic indeed, but it also takes a lot of math and science, plus the study of polls and trends to make and sell a TV show. — Kristoffer Polaha

Math?" "Yeah, math. Aren't all you Asians really good at math? — Rick Yancey

Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, "If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV" is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn't much fun. — Alfie Kohn

Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified 'math anxiety,' for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above. — Gloria Steinem

You should help a man to take up a burden, but you should not help him put it back down. — Pythagoras

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. — Colin Powell

But just as much as it is easy to find the differential [derivative] of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential. Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not. — Johann Bernoulli

We need more math classes, we need more science. It's the art of math and the art of science that creates all the innovation, and we have a tradition of great arts, great music. — Wynton Marsalis

They are four words I want you to keep in mind when critic's math gets loud. He wrote, We will miss you. — Jon Acuff

And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics. — William Joyce

I was always reading books when I should have been doing math and the rest of it. — Markus Zusak

Lottery was just a tax on people who weren't good at math. — Cindi Madsen

I like to crack the jokes now and again, but it's only because I struggle with math. — Tina Fey

When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker. — Flea

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Oh, he was a decent-enough high school student, good grades and well-liked, but his test scores were nothing to write home about. He might as well have Christmas-treed the math test. — Thomas Christopher Greene

How are you? she asked. It was a question that would've required some college-level math and about an hour of discussion to answer. I — Ransom Riggs

What I thought we might have a conversation about, is basically I do math, sir, not clandestine operations that severely deplete my mental resources. — Suzanne Stroh

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. — Anya Kamenetz

Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically. — Calvin Trillin

Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be home looking at how the math tutor was today. But it is what it is. — Renee James

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics? — Richard Courant

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that. — Freeman A. Hrabowski III

In school, my favorite subject was math. That's where I learned to count money. — French Montana

I'm an expert in higher level math. You + God = Enough — Zig Ziglar

See how the Ganga flows by and what a nice building! I like this place. This is the ideal kind of place for a Math. (in Belur, West Bengal). — Swami Vivekananda

Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life. — Yuri Manin

What makes you think they're spying on you?" "Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math - Evoked - and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again. — Neal Stephenson

What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

When we got to the Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue - again Win's full name is Windsor Horne Lockwood III, so you do the math - Dad said, "You want me to just drop you off?" Sometimes my father leaves me awestruck. Fatherhood is about balance, but how can one man do it so well, so effortlessly? Throughout my life he pushed me to excel without ever crossing the line. He reveled in my accomplishments yet never made them seem to be all that important. He loved without condition, yet he still made me want to please him. He knew, like now, when to be there, and when it was time to back off. "I'll be okay." He — Harlan Coben

The key to good worldbuilding is leaving out most of what you create. You, as the author, had damn well better know the where all that dragon food comes from, but that doesn't mean that I, as a reader, want to read a five thousand word essay about you explaining it to me. I don't need to see the math, but I can tell by the details you provide whether or not you've thought these things through to their logical conclusions. — Patrick Rothfuss

Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations. — Ralph P. Boas Jr.

We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers. — George W. Bush

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice. — Bill Nye

I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being. — Marvin Hamlisch

NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades; slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago... So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. — Diane Ravitch

I never thought that others would take my theories so much more seriously than I did. — Albert Einstein

What is the difference between method and device? A method is a device which you use twice. — George Polya

I don't think our music has much to do with math rock. — Ian Williams

That first winter, when it was time for her friends to leave, the girl ventured out into the show to say goodbye, and the stunning raven-haired Squaller handed her another gift.
"A blue kefta," said the math teacher, shaking her head. "What would she do with that?"
"Maybe she knew a Grisha who died," replied the cook, taking note of the tears that filled the girl's eyes. They did not see the note that read, You will always be one of us. — Leigh Bardugo

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects. — Allan McLeod Cormack

It doesn't seem to make sense in our eyes. To us, certain sins, like murder and adultery, seem "bigger." While "smaller" sins like anger and lust, many times go unnoticed. But, in Jesus' math, every sin, no matter how little or how big it seems in our eyes, will keep us from him. Or in other words, will "set off the alarm" in heaven one day unless we are cleansed by the blood of Jesus. — C.J. Hitz

I want my girls to love math. I want them to think that being a scientist is the coolest possible job on the planet. I want them to not be afraid to lean toward their femininity. — Jennifer Garner

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. — Andrea Kuszewsk

There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that's because you're dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion. Uh, when you're dealing with something with certainty, like, y'know, science or logic, you don't have the
there's no wiggle room; that's why history is not filled with warring math cults, y'know, because you can settle the issue; you can prove something to be right or wrong, and that's the end of the argument: next case. Whereas, when you're dealing with faith, you can forever argue your point, or another point, because you're dealing with intangibles. Personally, I think, faith is what you ask of somebody when you don't have the goods to prove your point. — Tom Quinn

Mathematics is for lazy people. — Peter Hilton

As the world continually multiplies, are we in a generation where people are divided, or people are equal? — Anthony Liccione

You can be obsessed with makeup and hair products and, you know, your appearance and still be absolutely making smart life decisions and work on your smarts, develop your smarts by studying something like math. Then you'll make much better decisions on the brands of clothing that you buy or whatever it is that you want. — Danica McKellar

As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure. — William Thurston

Done any exciting sums lately?"
"I don't just do sums," Miles told her. "There's much more to my life than that."
"Is there?" Alicia asked, trying to sound interested.
"Yes," said Miles. "Sometimes I draw graphs. — Sarah Rees Brennan

I was horrible at science and math. I couldn't pass a test to save my life! I'm surprised that it didn't take me until I was 20 to graduate. That's why my role is so cool - Grissom is the complete opposite of me. — William Petersen

Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed. — Caroline Knapp

Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful. — Martin Luther

Uniform Convergence & Associated Aracana item (d) for exceptional points, which again please recall can also be called 'discontinuities'. (N.B.: Some math classes also use singularity to mean exceptional point, which is both confusing and intriguing since the term also refers to Black Holes, which in a sense is what discontinuities are.) — David Foster Wallace

The 'Muse' is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake. — Roman Payne

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.'
So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up. — Deb Caletti

Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say thank you. — Charles Duhigg

In the one branch he most needed — Henry Adams

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college. — Danica McKellar

Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. [Fermat's] Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this. — Andrew John Wiles

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse. — Robert McKee

We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors know what high school seniors should know about American history. — Glenn Beck

You can't fix people like you can solve a math problem. — Wendy Brant

Quadratic reciprocity is the song of love in the land of prime numbers. — Kato

He doesn't seem to mind at all that he's stupid about math. — Wendy Lichtman

Mathematics is entirely free in its development, and its concepts are only linked by the necessity of being consistent, and are co-ordinated with concepts introduced previously by means of precise definitions. — Georg Cantor

The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous. — Herbert Wilf

Numerical precision is the very soul of science. — D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true. — John Astin

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. — Richard Feynman

I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I'm not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did. I mean, I read books written for laymen, not textbooks or anything. — Chris Parnell

He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side. — Plato

You're working with adults and you're being paid to do a job. And you're a kid. Then you go back to high school, and everybody's partying, and they're doing math. I always felt a little bit outside of it. Outside of both experiences, really. — Tatiana Maslany

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation. — Hermann Weyl

Thought
It does not take
a math genius
to understand that
when you subtract
a mother
from the equation
what remains
is negative. — Kwame Alexander

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

A great deal more is known than has been proved. — Richard P. Feynman

Mathematics is the Life of the Gods. — Novalis

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories. — Philip J. Davis

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all. — Shane Carruth

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus. — Debi Thomas

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man. — Maria Goeppert-Mayer

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking. — John Von Neumann

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin. — Thomm Quackenbush

Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and many calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other. — Abraham De Moivre