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If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.  ~John Louis von Neumann


Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.  ~Albert Einstein


Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.  ~Albert Einstein


Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.  ~Author Unknown


Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.  ~Isaac Barrow


I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.  ~Calvin Trillin


I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.  ~Stanislaw J. Lec, More Unkempt Thoughts


If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.  ~Phil Pastoret


[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.  ~Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary


"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;"  I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase.  I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:  "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born."  I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.  ~Charles Babbage, letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about a couplet in his "The Vision of Sin"


Math is radical!  ~Bumper Sticker


There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web.  They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles.  Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience.  The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.  ~Gregory Benford, Timescape


It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.  ~Author Unknown


If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.  ~Author Unknown


Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.  ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"


Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.  ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"


If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.  ~Richard Preston


Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.  ~Eric T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics


So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.  ~Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"


The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.  ~S. Gudder


The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra.  ~Author Unknown


The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.  ~Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire


Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.  ~Dean Schlicter


It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations.  It is the job of bank accountants.  ~Samuil Shchatunovski


Trigonometry is a sine of the times.  ~Author Unknown


Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.  Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.  ~W.S. Anglin


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


Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.  ~Alfred North Whitehead


The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.  ~Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture


Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.  ~Carl Boyer, 1949, calculus textbook


The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think.  This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.  ~Eric Bell, The Search for Truth


Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.  ~Author Unknown


The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.  ~Eric Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition



Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.  ~William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs


The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.  Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.  ~Bertrand Russell


Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.  ~Gottfried Leibniz


How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards?  You can subtract it as many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time.  ~Author Unknown


To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory.  Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts.  Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.  ~Ivars Peterson


With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.  ~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value


But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.  ~Harold Marston Morse


Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.  ~Gregory Bateson


Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.  ~Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love


The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones.  Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very definite way.  Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed.  Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.  ~Ronald L. Graham


We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it.  Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.  ~Mark Twain


Can you do Division?  Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that?  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.  ~Tobias Dantzig


Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of numbers.  ~Nicholas Eberstadt, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule


The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy.  Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.  ~Thomas Hill


The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.  Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days."  Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.  The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that....  The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation.  Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C).  The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed....  [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone."  A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C.  We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.  ~From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972


I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.... ~Stendhal (Henri Beyle), The Life of Henri Brulard


As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.  ~Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity


God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically.  ~Albert Einstein


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


To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology.  ~Hilda Phoebe Hudson


[T]he different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.  ~Lewis Carroll


[G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous.  ~Henri Poincaré


Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling.  ~Author Unknown


Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.  ~Bertrand Russell


God is real, unless declared integer.  ~Author Unknown


If a healthy minded person takes an interest in science, he gets busy with his mathematics and haunts the laboratory.  ~W.S. Franklin


Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.  ~Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World


There was a young man from Trinity,
Who solved the square root of infinity.
While counting the digits,
He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
~Author Unknown


One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers...  ~Heinrich Hertz


In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers.  ~Author Unknown


The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.  ~Euclid


In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes.  In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.  ~Hermann Hankel


Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.  Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.  I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.  ~Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky


I know that two and two make four - & should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 & 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron


Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting.  There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.  ~Ernst Mach


Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature.  Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.  ~Percy William Bridgman, The Way Things Are


A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars.  That's subtraction.  ~Mae West


I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own.  A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example.  Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants.  Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation....  ~Paul Auster, The Music of Chance


Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful?  ~Pliny the Elder, Natural History


Uneven numbers are the gods' delight.  ~Virgil, The Eclogues


One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.  ~Philip J. Davis


Pure mathematics is the world's best game.  It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly.  It's free.  It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub.  ~Richard J. Trudeau, Dots and Lines


I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.  ~Bertrand Russell, 1912


The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.  ~John Kemeny


Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so.  ~Robertson Davies, "Of the Conservation of Youth," The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks


A million thanks to Norm & Andy for submitting some of these quotes!

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