Famous quotes by Mathematicians

"I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic"

Stephen Cole Kleene, Mathematician

"Until I was four years old, I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"Quite likely, the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from within"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"In the fall term of 1933-34 I was on my family farm in Maine"

Stephen Cole Kleene, Mathematician

"I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy"

Stephen Cole Kleene, Mathematician

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible"

Simon Newcomb, Mathematician

"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, Mathematician

"All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers"

James C. Maxwell, Mathematician

"The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?"

James C. Maxwell, Mathematician

"I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me"

James C. Maxwell, Mathematician

"Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank, the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance"

James C. Maxwell, Mathematician

"Ampere was the Newton of Electricity"

James C. Maxwell, Mathematician

"The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions"

Alonzo Church, Mathematician

"Well, it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used"

Alonzo Church, Mathematician

"I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually, they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise, I would not have been able to continue"

Alonzo Church, Mathematician

"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, Mathematician

"For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?"

Richard Courant, Mathematician

"We conclude that, simultaneously with the organization of the colleges, there should be at Santa Cruz an organization by disciplines, whose units would have a voice in appointments and promotions, in course of programs, and in the allocation of funds for research"

Abraham Robinson, Mathematician

"It's almost as if a demon might have passed from one host to another"

John Forbes Nash, Jr., Mathematician

"I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959"

John Forbes Nash, Jr., Mathematician

"I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house"

John Forbes Nash, Jr., Mathematician

"If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?"

Martin Gardner, Mathematician

"The Committee supports the idea that there should be, within the University of California, a campus which puts particular emphasis on the education of undergraduates within the framework of a College system"

Abraham Robinson, Mathematician

"As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable"

Abraham Robinson, Mathematician

"A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship"

Martin Gardner, Mathematician

"We feel there is already widespread broadband available today"

John Britton, Mathematician

"There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry"

Martin Gardner, Mathematician

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