A Quote by Maryam Mirzakhani

The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Quote Topics

Beauty Followers Itself Mathematics More Only Patient Shows

Quote Author

Maryam Mirzakhani
Iranian - Mathematician
May 12, 1977 - July 14, 2017

I don't think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don't give mathematics a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

Oscar Wilde

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

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Bertrand Russell

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing - one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.

Paul Halmos

One would normally define a "religion" as a system of ideas that contain statements that cannot be logically or observationally demonstrated... Gödels theorem not only demonstrates that meathematics is a religion, but shows that mathematics is the only religion that proves itself to be one!

John D. Barrow

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Bertrand Russell

Pure mathematics offers no mercenary inducements to its followers, who is attracted to it by the importance and beauty of the truths in contains; and the complete absence of any material advantage to be gained by means of it, adds perhaps another charm to its study.

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art.

Raoul Hausmann

Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response.

Garry Wills

Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics has two faces: it is the rigorous science of Euclid, but it is also something else. Mathematics presented in the Euclidean way appears as a systematic, deductive science; but mathematics in the making appears as an experimental, inductive science. Both aspects are as old as the science of mathematics itself.

George Polya

It is impossible to overstate the imporance of problems in mathematics. It is by means of problems that mathematics develops and actually lifts itself by its own bootstraps... Every new discovery in mathematics, results from an attempt to solve some problem.

Howard Whitley Eves

Mathematics is much more than computation with pencil and a paper and getting answers to routine exercises. In fact, it can easily be argued that computation, such as doing long division, is not mathematics at all. Calculators can do the same thing and calculators can only calculate they cannot do mathematics.