Mathematician Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old mathematician quotes, mathematician sayings, and mathematician proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary. Paul Lockhart
The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct to distinguish between what is really worthy of his efforts and what is not. James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. G. H. Hardy
A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space. Bill Gaede
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. James Clerk Maxwell
Mathematicians boast of their exacting achievements, but in reality they are absorbed in mental acrobatics and contribute nothing to society. Ogyu Sorai
A mathematician thinks that two points are enough to define a straight line, while a physicist wants more data. Anonymous
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. Paul Erdos
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations between objects. Henri Poincare
A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today. Bill Gaede
Mathematicians come to the solution of a problem by the simple arrangement of the data, and reducing the reasoning to such simple operations, to judgments so brief, that they never lose sight of the evidence that serves as their guide. Antoine Lavoisier
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
A mathematician is an individual who proves his beliefs with equations. Bill Gaede
It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together. Richard Courant
It is up to mathematicians to look for truth; philosophers must be content with the probable. The concern of mathematicians is to seek the truth; philosophers must be happy with the probable. Giambattista Vico
The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another. Gosta Mittag-Leffler
All mathematicians share a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics. Martin Gardner
Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. Augustus De Morgan
Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand. Kenneth E. Boulding
If anything runs deeper than a mathematician's love of variables, it's a scientist's love of constants. Sam Kean
Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition. Morris Kline
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
Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. Leonhard Euler
The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying. Jean Dieudonne
Mathematicians are like managers they want improvement without change. Edsger Dijkstra
The mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence. Hans Reichenbach
Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations. Ralph Boas
The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty. Bertrand Russell
Pure mathematician just love to try unsolved problems they love a challenge. Andrew Wiles