Theorems In Mathematics Quotes & Sayings

Paul Erdos has a theory that God has a book containing all the theorems of mathematics with their absolutely most beautiful proofs, and when he wants to express particular appreciation of a proof he exclaims, "This is from the book!" — Ross Honsberger

Tomorrow I shall write something beautiful, something so serene
that storms will rise suddenly and protest with ferocious screams.
I shall write poems for the poets and for the songster a single song
That will tell a tale of such beauty the heart of earth shall moan.
But today, today shall be special for all I will do
is sit quietly alone and think of you and think of you. — Tonny K. Brown

Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation. — Ivars Peterson

Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid. — Primo Levi

Tengo's lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the romance concealed in the questions it posed. Tengo saw admiration in the eyes of several of his female students, and he realized that he was seducing these seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds through mathematics. His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs; theorems sent warm breath into their ears. — Haruki Murakami

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove 1 + 1 = 2. — Ted Chiang

Fate chooses your relations,
you choose your friends. — Jacques Delille

I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book ... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life. — Jodi Picoult

We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial. — Richard P. Feynman

I never had the desire to be a professional Twitterer. Every now and then something dumb pops into my head and I'll tweet it. I don't feel any obligation to respond to everyone. Not that I don't appreciate people sending me messages on there, but there are too many. Responding to everyone would take away time for all the stuff I'm actually in the business for [stand-up or scripts]. — Aziz Ansari

Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs. — Kenneth Appel

Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems - general and specific statements - can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences. — Christopher Zeeman

Failure is never getting hurt. Because that means you've not done anything you cared about. — Holly Bourne

I think that mathematics can benefit by acknowledging that the creation of good models is just as important as proving deep theorems. — David Mumford

The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. — G.H. Hardy

Now we can see what makes mathematics unique. Only in mathematics is there no significant correction - only extension. Once the Greeks had developed the deductive method, they were correct in what they did, correct for all time. Euclid was incomplete and his work has been extended enormously, but it has not had to be corrected. His theorems are, every one of them, valid to this day. — Carl B. Boyer

Though determinants and matrices received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century and thousands of papers were written on these subjects, they do not constitute great innovations in mathematics ... Neither determinants nor matrices have influenced deeply the course of mathematics despite their utility as compact expressions and despite the suggestiveness of matrices as concrete groups for the discernment of general theorems of group theory ... — Morris Kline

Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal. — Gian-Carlo Rota

If only I had the Theorems! Then I should find the proofs easily enough. — Bernhard Riemann

One can be enlightened about proofs as well as theorems. Without enlightenment, one is merely reduced to memorizing proofs. With enlightenment about a proof, its flow becomes clear and it can become an item of astonishing beauty. In addition, the need to memorize disappears because the proof has become part of your soul. — Herbert S. Gaskill

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

The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new. — William Thurston

I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn. — Archimedes

Russia is an amazing country to be an entrepreneur. — Maelle Gavet

To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples ... — John B. Conway

Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or mathematics envy. — Marvin Minsky

No one can make fun of overweight people in front of me! — Richard Simmons

It is both mysterious and miraculous that roughly the same intelligence necessary to flake a barbed spearpoint is sufficient to discover the theorems of mathematics. In a different universe, it might have been otherwise. And so human beings would have been spared the tragedy of existing half as ape and half as god. — David Zindell

Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations. — Imre Lakatos

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. — G.H. Hardy

A peculiarity of the higher arithmetic is the great difficulty which has often been experienced in proving simple general theorems which had been suggested quite naturally by numerical evidence. — Harold Davenport

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

Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos. — Clifford A. Pickover

I am not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless I'm always saying that the SF( The SF is the supreme Fascist, the Number-One guy up there) has this transfinite book-transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite-that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect. — Paul Erdos