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I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
Sep 15, 2025
If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.
Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.
We never know what we are talking about.
Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.
The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
But in the new (math) approach, the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer.
No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.
There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent.
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
Mathematics consists in proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.
Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
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.
Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
Nixon's motto was, if two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well!
Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.
[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.
Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
Know what you're talking about.
Know what you are talking about.
Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
You're at your best when you don't know what you're doing.
Pressure is something you feel when you do not know what you are doing.
When you don't know what you're doing, fake it.
As long as algebra is taught in school, there will be prayer in school.
Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants.
The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings, and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to senses tried by the present day kaleidoscope of events.