MATHEMATICS

Quotes Collected by Ken Knowlton



 

God forbid that Truth should be Confined to Mathematical Demonstrations.
     — William Blake

Dr. J. Bronowski among others has pointed out that mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually, in terms of the success of this metaphor.
     — J. Bronowski, as reported by Norbert Wiener

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
     — Albert Einstein

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

The geometrical mind is not so closely bound to geometry that it cannot be drawn aside and transferred to other departments of knowledge. A work of morality, politics, criticism, perhaps even eloquence will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.
     — Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

The grand book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics.
     — Galileo Galilei

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
     — William James

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

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

 
 
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