Quotes

Our designer, Rob Malootian, is seeking quotes from famous people describing, alluding to, or evoking the connection of mathematics to each of the six broad theme areas we have identified (Nature, Design, Art, Business, Communication, Entertainment). Please post your suggestions in the appropriate section below:

Nature

• 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
• For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics. ~ Roger Bacon
• But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain. ~ Albert Einstein
• It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world. ~ Aristotle
• With me, everything turns into mathematics. ~ Rene Descartes
• All the effects of nature are only mathematical results of a small number of immutable laws. ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace
• La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi a gli occhi (io dico l’universo), ma non si può intendere se prima non s’impara a intender la lingua, e conoscer i carattere, ne’ quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi, ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezi è impossibile a intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro laberinto. (Philosophy is written in this grand book-I mean the universe-which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.) ~ Galileo Galilei
• The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. ~S. Gudder
• The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. ~Euclid
• All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures. ... From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. ~Sir James Hopwood Jeans
• Die Mathematik ist die Königin der Wissenschaften und die Zahlentheorie ist die Königin der Mathematik. (Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics.) Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Nature has ... some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coordinate system, because nature has all kinds of models. What we experience of nature is in models, and all of nature's models are so beautiful. It struck me that nature's system must be a real beauty, because in chemistry we find that the associations are always in beautiful whole numbers---there are no fractions. ~ Richard Buckminster Fuller
• The language of mathematics reveals itself unreasonably effective in the natural sciences. ~ Eugene Paul Wigner
• The profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries. (L'étude approfondie de la nature est la source la plus féconde des découvertes mathématiques.) - Joseph Fourier

Design

• Number is the ruler of forms and ideas ~ Pythagoras
• Symmetry, as wide or narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection. ~ Hermann Weyl
• Bridges would be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them. ~ David Norman Mermin

Art

• Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. ~Gottfried Leibniz
• 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
• 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 Mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful. ~ Aristotle
• Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless. ~ Euripides
• ... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art. ~ John W. N. Sullivan
• A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ~ Godfrey Harold Hardy
• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty---a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. ~ Bertrand Russell

Business

• A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That's subtraction. ~Mae West
• The advancement and prosperity of the nation are closely joined to the prosperity of the nation. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

Communication

• Mathematics has isolated and refined the abstract elements that are essential to all human languages. ~ F. David Peat
• 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.
• Mathematics _is_ a language. ~ Josiah Willard Gibbs

Entertainment

• 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
• Film is one of the three universal languages; the other two: mathematics and music. ~ Frank Capra

Math itself

If you come across quotes that bring out the aspects of math highlighted in our mission statement, please record them here:

• Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. — W.S. Anglin
• Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas. - Ivars Peterson
• Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. ~ Dean Schlicter
• The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. ~ Havelock Ellis
• The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead