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 assume the right to choose, within the limits of logical contradiction, what path they please in reaching their results. Henry Brooks Adams
A mathematician has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words. G. H. Hardy
Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income. Isaac Asimov
Mathematicians seem to have no difficulty in creating new concepts faster than the old ones become well understood. Edward Norton Lorenz
If a man is in any sense a real mathematician, then it is a hundred to one that his mathematics will be far better than anything else he can do, and that it would be silly if he surrendered any decent opportunity of exercising his one talent in order to do undistinguished work in other fields. Such a sacrifice could be justified only by economic necessity of age. G. H. Hardy
It is possible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. Sofia Kovalevskaya
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. Havelock Ellis
Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them. Jimmy Chin
A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks. Gian-Carlo Rota
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. Charles Darwin
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. G. H. Hardy
All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They're adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one. Sylvain Cappell