Top 12 Math Quotes plus a few more . . .

 

1.        As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.—Arthur Cayley

2.        It isn’t that they cannot see the solution.  It is that they cannot see the problem.—GK Chesterton

3.        The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.—C.W. Churchmann

4.        The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.—Havelock Ellis

5.        The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.—Blaise Pascal

6.        The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with facts for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.—Ernest Renan

7.        An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible quantities: a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity.--Howard W. Even

8.        Technical skill is mastery of complexity.  Creativity is mastery of simplicity.—E.C. Zeeman

9.        Mathematical knowledge adds vigour to the mind, frees it from prejudice, credulity, and superstition.—John Arbuthnot

10.     I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.—John Adams

11.     A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.—Howard W. Eves

12.     The study of mathematics cannot be replaced by any other activity that will train and develop man's purely logical faculties to the same level of rationality.—C.O Oakley

13.     You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are.  If you want to get anywhere, you'll have to run much faster.—Lewis Carroll

14.     Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.—John William Navin Sullivan (1886-1937)

15.     I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.—Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

16.     How could youths better learn to live than by once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would educate their minds as much as mathematics.— Henry David Thoreau

17.     The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.—William James (1842 - 1910)

18.     Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.—Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

19.     Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.—On the lever in Pappus Synagoge

20.     Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.—Newton

21.     Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.—Blaise Pascal

22.     It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.—Rene Descartes

23.     Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.—Rene Descartes

24.     If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.—John Louis von Neumann

25.     Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.—Albert Einstein

26.     So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.—Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"

27.     Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.—Dean Schlicter

28.     Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.  Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.—W.S. Anglin

29.     Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.—Alfred North Whitehead

30.     Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.—Tobias Dantzig

31.     It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.—John Wesley Young

32.     Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.—John Allen Paulos

33.     The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.—Augustus de Morgan

34.     Questions are creative acts of intelligence.—Frank Kingdon

35.     Two and two the mathematician continues to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for

      five.—James McNeill Whistler

36.  The work of a teacher -- exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same -- is at its heart, an intellectual and

      ethical enterprise.  Teaching is the vocation of vocations...—William Ayres

37.     To learn, you must want to be taught.–Proverbs 12:1

38.     Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.—Henry Ford

39.     You live your life between your ears.—Bebe Moore Campbell

40.     The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.—Alfred North Whitehead

41.     If there's no struggle, there's no progress.—Frederick Douglass

42.     The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.-- Paul Halmos

43.     The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers!—R. W. Hamming

44.     Do not falter or shrink.  Just think out your work, and work out your think.—Nixon Waterman

45.     There is a difference between not knowing and not knowing yet.—Shelia Tobias

46.     Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.—Bernard Baruch

47.     Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.—Albert Einstein

 

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