A Quote by Nicolaus Copernicus

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur Mathematics is written for mathematicians De Revolutionibus

Nicolaus Copernicus

Quote Topics

Mathematicians Mathematics Written

Quote Author

Nicolaus Copernicus
Polish - Scientist
February 19, 1473 - May 24, 1543

If there should chance to be any mathematicians who, ignorant in mathematics yet pretending to skill in that science, should dare, upon the authority of some passage of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my hypothesis, I value them not, and scorn their inconsiderate judgement. De Revolutionibus Coelestibus

Nicolaus Copernicus

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

Edsger Dijkstra

In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty years or so that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians agree: mathematics is the science of patterns.

Keith Devlin

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

Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our philosophers do not know mathematics and - to go a step further - our mathematicians do not know mathematics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

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

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

So in the end it wasn't Gödel, it wasn't Turing, and it wasn't my results that are making mathematics go into an experimental mathematics direction, in a quasi-empirical direction. The reason why mathematicians are changing their working habits is the computer. I think that this is an excellent joke!

Gregory Chaitin

We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

Thomas Reid

A Noah's Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, 'Almost All Children Left Behind.'

David Mumford

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

G. H. Hardy

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

Jack Edmonds

Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.

Augustus De Morgan

Mathematics may be likened to a large rock whose interior composition we wish to examine. The older mathematicians appear as persevering stone cutters slowly attempting to demolish the rock from the outside with hammer and chisel. The later mathematicians resemble expert miners who seek vulnerable veins, drill into these strategic places, and then blast the rock apart with well placed internal charges.