With all the greats from Cantor to Gauss, from Plato all the way to Marcus du Sautoy, not to mention Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, and even members of our own society, here are 100 of the greatest, most inspirational, or just plain funny mathematical quotes.
1
“Pure mathematics, is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”
Albert Einstein
2
“In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.”
Georg Cantor
3
“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession, but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss
4
“Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you mine are far greater.”
Albert Einstein
5
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Albert Einstein
6
“In math, you’re either right or you’re wrong.”
Katherine Johnson
7
“The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.”
Paul Halmos
8
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Alfred Rényi
9
“A topologist is someone who doesn’t know the difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup.”
John Kelley
10
“Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss
11
“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”
Godfrey Harold Hardy
12
“Math is the language of the universe. So, the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
13
“To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.”
Pierre de Fermat
14
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Niels Bohr
15
“Politicians use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination.”
Andrew Lang
16
“If P = NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in ‘creative leaps,’ no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognising the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss…”
Scott Aaronson
17
“Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
Bertrand Russell
18
“The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.”
Georg Cantor
19
“Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.”
Henri Poincaré
20
“Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.”
David Hilbert
21
“Mathematics is the music of reason.”
James Joseph Sylvester
22
“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.”
Marcus du Sautoy
23
“Mathematics is not just a subject, it is a language that allows us to unlock the mysteries of the universe.”
Katherine Johnson
24
“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.”
Augustus de Morgan
25
“No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.”
George Boole
26
“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”
David Hilbert
27
“In Mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.”
John von Neumann
28
“The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.”
Charles Caleb Colton
29
“There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else – but persistent.”
Raoul Bott
30
“‘Obvious’ is the most dangerous word in mathematics.”
Eric Temple Bell
31
“An expert problem solver must be endowed with two incompatible quantities: a restless imagination and a patient pertinacity.”
Howard Eves
32
“The traditional mathematician recognises 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
33
“Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.”
Stendhal
34
“The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.”
Eric Temple Bell
35
“An elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.”
Morris Kline
36
“Mathematicians aren’t people who find Maths easy. They’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”
Andrew Sainsbury
37
“The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to its more patient followers.”
Maryam Mirzakhani
38
“I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one of the most productive ways of making progress.”
Maryam Mirzakhani
39
“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.”
Richard Courant
40
“Some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they’re extremely hard to solve. There’s no reason why these problems shouldn’t be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate.”
Andrew Wiles
41
“I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one of the most productive ways of making progress.”
Pál Turán
42
“What we really need is a machine for turning some of those theorems back into coffee.”
AJ Tolland
43
“Arithmetic is being able to count to twenty without taking off your shoes.”
Mickey Mouse
44
“I love maths because it is the unending, eternally beautiful and simple fabric that links all of life and existence… and studying it is brilliant fun!”
Charlton C
45
“I love maths because you can transpose everything in the world into maths, therefore logicising and simplifying what is so chaotic. It puts the world into order.”
Emily B
46
“STEP questions lure you in. The first part will ask ‘if I have a fair coin what is the probability it comes up heads’? The second bit will say: ‘if I have 5 biased coins and am blindfolded what is the probability it was raining last Tuesday?’”
Ed Tansley
47
“In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for re-election.”
Hugo Rossi
48
“He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its sides.”
Plato
49
“Medicine makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, and theology makes them sinful.”
Martin Luther
50
“Good! He did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.”
David Hilbert (on hearing that a student has dropped maths to study poetry instead)
51
“Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.”
Ada Lovelace
52
“Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.”
Maimonides
53
“An interesting theorem of mathematics differs from interesting results in other fields because over and above the surprise and beauty of what it says, it has as ‘aspect of eternity’; it is always part of an infinite chain of results.”
Leo Zippin
54
“Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.”
Yuri Manin
55
“A theory has the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has the third possibility; it may be right but irrelevant.”
Manfred Eigen
56
“I have had my results for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss
57
“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
Gottfried Leibniz
58
“To be a good general you must know mathematics, it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
59
“We all make mistakes. Relentlessly. And that is nothing to be feared.”
Matt Parker
60
“Number rules the universe.”
Pythagoras
61
“Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.”
Shakuntala Devi
62
“Life is good only for two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.”
Siméon Denis Poisson
63
“Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.”
Tobias Dantzig
64
“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Isaac Newton
65
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
John von Neumann
66
“Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world.”
Roger Bacon
67
“God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”
Paul Dirac
68
“Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
69
“How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?”
Albert Einstein
70
“The study of mathematics is like a huge connecting fabric, a tapestry that’s being woven together.”
Terence Tao
71
“Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss
72
“Where there is matter, there is geometry.”
Johannes Kepler
73
“It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.”
John Wesley Young
74
“Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”
David Hilbert
75
“The search for truth is more precious than its possession.”
Albert Einstein
76
“Structure is the essence of mathematics.”
Saunders Mac Lane
77
“Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, computations, or algorithms: it is about understanding.”
William Paul Thurston
78
“Logic is the anatomy of thought.”
John Locke
79
“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
Leo Tolstoy
80
“The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language.”
Galileo Galilei
81
“Mathematics is written for mathematicians.”
Nicolaus Copernicus
82
“To non-mathematicians, this is a pleasure: that mathematics, because it is correct, is also beautiful.”
Alan Turing
83
“Standard mathematics can be used to describe the world, but it takes extraordinary mathematics to change it.”
Benoit Mandelbrot
84
“Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”
Blaise Pascal
85
“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”
Dean Schlicter
86
“Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.”
Eric Temple Bell
87
“One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.”
Phillip J. Davis
88
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.”
Bertrand Russell
89
“The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.”
Plato
90
“There is no noble branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world”
Nikolai Lobachevsky
91
“Counting is the religion of the modern world.”
Sarah Bernhardt
92
“Mathematics consists of proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.”
George Polya
93
“The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss
94
“Every new body of discovery is received with a outcry of beliefs that it is useless, or dangerous, or both.”
Mary Somerville
95
“The brain is a computer that is capable of generating mathematics, but mathematics itself exists independently of humans.”
Roger Penrose
96
“Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences.”
Roger Bacon
97
“Proof is the idol before which the pure mathematician bows down.”
Arthur Eddington
98
“Black holes are where God divided by zero”
Steven Wright
99
“In mathematics, the art of asking the right question is more important than solving it.”
Georg Cantor
100
“Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent.”
PythagorasWe hope you enjoyed this collection of 100 maths quotes! Contact us if you have any further suggestions (or want to contribute any of your own!)