M Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with M. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection.”
“Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.”
Source: What is Mathematics?: An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods
“Mathematics as we know it and as it has come to shape modern science could never have come into being without some disregard for the dangers of the infinite.”
“Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.”
“Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.”
“Mathematics can have its problems, but it's actually hasn't seen a lot of the problems as some of the other sciences and so much of it in what people are doing is completely useless. Nobody kind of in really cares very much. You don't really have kind of right and left and people in ideology coming in because there isn't any. It just doesn't actually connect up to the kinds of things that people ideologically worry about. So most of mathematics just doesn't tell you anything one way or another about global warming or about healthcare or about any number of things that you might care about.”
“Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.”
Source: The Wisdom of Goethe
“Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”
“Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad - All 20 Works in One Premium Edition: Including Unforgettable Titles like Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and Many More (With Author’s Letters, Memoirs and Critical Essays)
“Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”
“Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.”
Source: Mathematical discovery: on understanding, learning, and teaching problem solving
“Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.”
Source: The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays
“Mathematics directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars.”
Source: Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
“Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.”
Source: Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
“Mathematics does not lie, there are many lying mathematicians.”
“Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers.”
“Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.”
“Mathematics exists solely for the honour of the human mind.”
“Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.”
Source: War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet -- and Do Not
“Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him ; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to rest had no tendency to prove them. But he had been endeavouring to give a more active and positive help than this to the cause of what he deemed pure religion.”
“Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.”
“Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.”
“Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.”
Source: Gesammelte Abhandlungen
“Mathematics has been described as “not just a language”, as a language plus reasoning, a language plus logic, as a tool for reasoning. In truth, mathematics is reason. It’s how reason manifests itself ontologically. It’s exactly because the universe is made of math that it’s a rational place, obeying the principle of sufficient reason. That’s why everything has an explanation.”
Source: Causation and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
“Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.”
“Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.”
“Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.”
Source: De Quincey's Writings: Essays on philosophical writers and other men of letters. 1854-60. [v. 14 stereotyped
“Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.”
“Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.”
Source: Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy
“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.”
Source: How to solve it: a new aspect of mathematical method
“Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.”
“Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.”
Source: Mathematics in Western Culture
“Mathematics is a collection of cheap tricks and dirty jokes.”
“Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.”
Source: Littlewood's Miscellany
“Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.”
Source: Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth
“Mathematics is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behavior, which does not find fulfilment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth.”
Source: Collected Papers of Salomon Bochner
“Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”
“Mathematics is a language”
“Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.”
“Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.”
“Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.”
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.”
Source: RULES FOR THE DIRECTION OF THE MIND DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE MEDITATIONS AND REPLIES THE GEOMETRY
“Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.”
“Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.”
“Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs.”
“Mathematics is a vast adventure; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.”
Source: A Concise History of Mathematics
“Mathematics is a world created by the mind of men, and mathematicians are people who devote their lives to what seems to me a wonderful kind of play!”
“Mathematics is about logic, reasoning, knowledge, and guidance”
Source: Elementary Algebra: For Grades 4-8
“Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.”
“Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student's mathematical life. Painful and creatively frustrating as it may be, students and their teachers should at all times be engaged in the process - having ideas, not having ideas, discovering patterns, making conjectures, constructing examples and counterexamples, devising arguments, and critiquing each other's work.”