Quotations

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. 

-Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 – 1862) 

There are no problems, just pauses between ideas.

-from The Brotherhood of the Rose, by the author David Morrell (April 24, 1943 - present)

If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them. 

-Phil Pastoret

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.  

But in practice, there is.

-Anonymous (-infinity to +infinity)

It was recently discovered that - within a 5 percent confidence interval - 36.7 percent of all statistical tests are not to be trusted. 

-Anonymous (-infinity to +infinity)

Mathematics is like love; a simple idea, but it can get complicated.

-Anonymous  (-infinity to +infinity)

On the one hand, research is using our ignorance as a springboard for fantasy.  

On the other hand, a healthy fantasy helps us aspire to greater heights.

-Anonymous  (-infinity to +infinity)

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. 

-Dean Schlicter

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."

-William Congreve (1670-1729)  (from his play "The Mourning Bride", 1697)

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.  

-Carl Boyer, 1949, calculus textbook

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

-Thomas Alva Edison  (February 11,1847 - 1931)

The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

-David Mumford 

If triangles had a god, it would have 3 sides.

-Voltaire  (November 21, 1694 -1778)

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.  

-Arthur Stanley Eddington (The Nature of the Physical World)

There was a young man from Trinity,

Who solved the square root of infinity.

While counting the digits,

He was seized by the fidgets,

Dropped science, and took up divinity.

-Anonymous  (-infinity to +infinity)

There's a limit to how many times you can read how great you are and what an inspiration you are, but I'm not there yet.

-Randy Pausch (October 23, 1960 --2008)

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.  

-Euclid  (circa 300 BC)

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

A tragedy of mathematics is a beautiful conjecture ruined by an ugly fact.

-Anonymous (-infinity to +infinity)

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

-E.T. Bell  (February 7, 1883 - 1960)

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing 

is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

-Albert Einstein (March 14,1879-1955)

2 is not equal to 3 - not even for very large values of 2.

-“Grabel's Law”

One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity.

-Gibbs, Josiah Willard

God is like a skillful Geometrician.

-Browne, Sir Thomas

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, 

and statistics.

-Disraeli, Benjamin

“My dear Watson, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

-Sherlock Holmes 

(A character written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that 

can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

-Heisenberg, Werner (Deceber 5,1901-1976)

There are THREE kinds of people in this world:  those who can count, 

and those who cannot count.  

-Anonymous  (-infinity to +infinity)

______________________________

There was a young man who said "God

Must find it exceedingly odd

   To think that the tree

   Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;

For I am always about in the quad.

   And that's why the tree

   Will continue to be

Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God." 

-George Berkeley (March 12, 1685-1753)

Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.

-Richard Friedman 

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things. 

-Gottfried Leibniz

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

-Immanual Kant

A felicitous but unproved conjecture may be of much more 

consequence for mathematics than the proof of 

many a respectable theorem."

-Atle Selberg  (14 June 1917 – 2007)

The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones.  Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very definite way.  Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed.  Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.  

-Ronald L. Graham (born October 31, 1935)   

A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

-Kurt Vonnegut  (November 11, 1922 - 2007) 

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. 

-Mark Twain

I was educated once - it took me years to get over it.

-Mark Twain

To see a world in a grain of sand

   and a heaven in a wild flower

   hold infinity in the palm of your hand

   and eternity in an hour. 

-William Blake  

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. 

-George S. Patton  (November 11, 1885 - 1945) 

The worst thing you can do to a problem is solve it completely.

-Daniel Kleitman (born October 4, 1934)  

No problem is so intractable that something interesting cannot be said about it. 

-Jeffrey Lagarias (born November, 1949)

We are drowning in information, but starving for knowledge.

-Rutherford D. Roger 

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science 

and the liberal arts.

-Baruch Spinoza  (November 24, 1632 - 1677)

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

-Baruch Spinoza 

The world is a comedy to those who think 

and a tragedy to those who feel.

-Horace Walpole

"This research paper is too definitive for its own good"

(Anonymous referee report - true story!)

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

-George Eliot

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  (February 7, 1877-1947)     (from "A Mathematician's Apology")

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself;  but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

-Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743-1826)  

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery  (June 29, 1900 - 1944)