MATHEMATICS

Related Subjects: Learning, Numbers, Science

1. The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Dance of Life
   

2. Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.—KASNER & NEWMAN, Mathematics & the Imagination
   

3. When the Greek philosophers found that the square root of 2 is not a rational number, they celebrated the discovery by sacrificing zoo oxen.—KASNER & NEWMAN, Mathematics & the Imagination
   

4. Ultimately mathematics reaches pinnacles as high as those attained by the imagination in its most daring reconnoiters.—KASNER & NEWMAN, Mathematics & the Imagination
   

5. Geometry is the purest realization of human reason; but Euclid's axioms cannot be proved. He who does not believe in them sees the whole building crash.—ARTHUR KOESTLER, Darkness at Noon
   

6. O King, for traveling over the country there are both royal roads and roads for common citizens; but in geometry there is one road for all.—MENAECHMUS, to Alexander
   

7. I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of
   reasoning.—PLATO, The Republic
   

8. Mathematics 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, sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.—BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Study of Mathematics
   

9. In pure mathematics the maximum of detachment appears to be reached: the mind moves in an infinitely complicated pattern, which is absolutely free from temporal considerations. Yet this very freedom—the essential condition of the mathematician's activity—perhaps gives him an unfair advantage. He can only be wrong—he cannot cheat.—LYTTON STRACHEY, Portraits in Miniature
   

10. 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,Science and the Modern World