Top 342 Mathematician Quotes & Sayings

Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician.

An axiomatic system establishes a reverberating relationship between what a mathematician assumes (the axioms) and what he or she can derive (the theorems). In the best of circumstances, the relationship is clear enough so that the mathematician can submit his or her reasoning to an informal checklist, passing from step to step with the easy confidence the steps are small enough so that he cannot be embarrassed nor she tripped up.

The computer was, to the best of my feelings about the subject, not thinking like a mathematician, and it was much more successful, because it was thinking not like a mathematician.

The library is the mathematician's laboratory.

A mathematician either has a feeling for equations and an understanding and delight in it, not only in the purity of it, but in its beauty as well. I don't think that's something that you learn at school. I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.

You don't have to be a genius mathematician to have a career in cyber security, but it certainly helps to be a strong mathematician.

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

A mathematician experiments, amasses information, makes a conjecture, finds out that it does not work, gets confused and then tries to recover. A good mathematician eventually does so - and proves a theorem.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.

I'm a mathematician and always have been, as far as I can remember. I don't remember when I first got involved with mathematics, but I think of myself always as a mathematician first.

I'm a mathematician because I'm too slow to be a writer.

I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.

Am I really a good mathematician?

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

To your care and recommendation am I indebted for having replaced a half-blind mathematician with a mathematician with both eyes, which will especially please the anatomical members of my Academy.

I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.

The desire to explore thus marks out the mathematician. This is one of the forces making for the growth of mathematics. The mathematician enjoys what he already knows; he is eager for more knowledge.

A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.

I'm no mathematician, so I'm stuck with the graphic representations.

Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, he said: I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.

A mathematician who can only generalise is like a monkey who can only climb up a tree, and a mathematician who can only specialise is like a monkey who can only climb down a tree. In fact neither the up monkey nor the down monkey is a viable creature. A real monkey must find food and escape his enemies and so must be able to incessantly climb up and down. A real mathematician must be able to generalise and specialise.

An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.

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.

The constructs of the mathematical mind are at the same time free and necessary. The individual mathematician feels free to define his notions and set up his axioms as he pleases. But the question is will he get his fellow mathematician interested in the constructs of his imagination. We cannot help the feeling that certain mathematical structures which have evolved through the combined efforts of the mathematical community bear the stamp of a necessity not affected by the accidents of their historical birth.

Art and creativity are crucial, whether you're a mathematician, a scientist, or an artist.

Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.

I know myself. I'm not gonna be a mathematician or a professor.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

You don't watch 'A Beautiful Mind' and say, 'This is how every mathematician is.'

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

That's my mathematician who examines problems which I put before him and checks their validity. You see, I am not myself a good mathematician.

I'm not a scientist or a mathematician.

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

A person who can, within a year, solve x2 - 92y2 = 1 is a mathematician.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

A Mathematician is someone who can take a cup of coffee and turn it into a theory.

I think you can fan the flames, but I think in the same way that a mathematician is a mathematician - He's not taught to be a mathematician. He either has a feeling for equations and an understanding and delight in it, not only in the purity of it, but in its beauty as well.

It was not to learn about politics that I had gone to Cambridge. I was there as a mathematician, having won a major scholarship to Trinity College the previous year. Perhaps if there had not been quite so many things to distract me, I might have remained a mathematician.

Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.

When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, "one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world."

I'm a mathematician by education, but I have this other thing. A gut instinct.