Mathematician Quotes

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

Known, Capable, Reasoning

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
E. O. Wilson

Time, Two, Theory

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.
Stefan Banach

Best, Person, Find

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.
Jacques Derrida

Angry, Someone, Understand

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

Human, Thought, Highest

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
G. H. Hardy

Made, Ideas, Poet

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
Carl Friedrich Gauss

Mean, Doubt, Two

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Paul Erdos

Coffee, Turning, Device

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.
Clifford Geertz

Beauty, Thinking, Different

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

A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
Henri Poincare

Work, Nature, Great

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.
Philip Emeagwali

Become, Wanted, Astronomer

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

Before, Himself, Pure

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.
Edsger Dijkstra

Step, Consider, Essential

I used to be really cute. I could send you earlier photos where I'm stunning. But I've gained about twenty pounds over the past two years, and the more weight I've put on, the more success I've had. If you drew a diagram of weight gain and me getting more work, a mathematician would draw some conclusions from that.
Zach Galifianakis

Success, Work, Past

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.
Stefan Banach

Between, Imagine, Ultimate

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.
David Chalmers

Science, Thought, Started

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.
David Chalmers

Time, Around, Wonderful

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
Godfrey Harold Hardy

Made, Ideas, Poet

And when I go around and talk to schools, what I tell the kids are, first of all, you have to accept each other's differences. Some of you are going to be a crappy football player, some of you are going to be a great mathematician. Whatever it is, accept each other's differences and help prop each other up.
Vince Flynn

Great, Help, Football

I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.
John Pople

Follow, Longer, Modern

Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.
E. T. Bell

Half, Meeting, Rare

Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
Andre Weil

Charlie's not your conventional mathematician... we sexed him up a little bit.
David Krumholtz

Him, Bit, Charlie

The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.
James C. Maxwell

May, Said, Whole

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
James Jeans

Great, Universe, Creation

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

Soul, Impossible, Poet

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

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
James Joseph Sylvester

Life, Music, May

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

Career, Wanted, Early

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