Quotes & Sayings About Mathematics Famous

It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tend to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations. — Terry Pratchett

A famous Japanese Zen master, Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, said that unless you can explain Zen in words that a fisherman will comprehend, you don't know what you're talking about. Some fifty years ago a UCLA professor told me the same thing about applied mathematics. We like to hide from the truth behind foreign-sounding words or mathematical lingo. There's a saying: The truth is always encountered but rarely perceived. If we don't perceive it, we can't help ourselves and we can't much help anyone else. — Jeff Bridges

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers. — Kenneth E. Boulding

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art. — Ernest Rutherford

This special was followed one month later by "Bart the Genius." This was the first genuine episode of The Simpsons , inasmuch as it premiered the famous trademark opening sequence and included the debut of Bart's notorious catchphrase "Eat my shorts." Most noteworthy of all, "Bart the Genius" contains a serious dose of mathematics. In many ways, this episode set the tone for what was to follow over the next two decades, namely a relentless series of numerical references and nods to geometry that would earn The Simpsons a special place in the hearts of mathematicians. — Simon Singh

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. — Steven Weinberg

Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. — Israel Gelfand

In 1931, Kurt Godel proved in his famous second incompleteness theorem that there could be no finitary proof of the consistency of arithmetic. He had killed Hilbert's program with a single stroke.

So should you be worried that all of mathematics might collapse tomorrow afternoon? For what it's worth, I'm not. I do believe in infinite sets, and I find the proofs of consistency that use infinite sets to be convincing enough to let me sleep at night. — Jordan Ellenberg

He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.

{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss} — Niels Henrik Abel

The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have all been conjectured, sometimes a hundred years or more before they were proved; and they have been suggested by the evidence of a mass of computations. — G.H. Hardy