A Quote by Leonardo da Vinci
Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.
Related Quotes
Whoever despises himself still esteems the despiser within himself.
Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.
Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.
There are four great sciences, without which the other sciences cannot be known nor a knowledge of things secured ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics ... He who is ignorant of this [mathematics] cannot know the other sciences nor the affairs of this world.
Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.
If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking.
For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him, and admires whoever will not bend before him.
Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.
An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
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.
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.
I still partially suffer from the delusion that if you explain things logically and systematically, most people will abandon their emotional prejudices and respond to logic. But I don't suffer from that delusion as wholeheartedly as I did in the past. So if there's a fundamental difference, it's that I've accepted the fact that most imbeciles will never 'get' me and I shouldn't allow myself to get so upset about it.
Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
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.
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