“Quello del matematico è un mestiere stupendo: il matematico è uno specialista che si interessa di tutto...”
(“That of the mathematician is a beautiful job: the mathematician is a specialist who is interested in everything...”)
— Giovanni Prodi
“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
“O binómio de Newton é tão belo como a Vénus de Milo. O que há é pouca gente para dar por isso.”
(“Newton’s Binomial theorem is as beautiful as the Venus of Milo. The problem is that very few people realize this.”)
— Fernando Pessoa
“Mathématique est l’art de donner le même nom à des choses différentes.”
(“Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.”)
— Jules Henri Poincaré
“Mathematics is being lazy. Mathematics is letting the principles do the work for you so that you do not have to do the work for yourself.”
— George Pólya
“This is the most important function in mathematics.”
— Walter Rudin, page 1 of Real and complex analysis. Third edition. McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1987
“The property that exp and log are the inverse of one another is nothing but an analytic reflex of the combinatorial fact that permutations uniquely decompose into cycles!”
— Philippe Flajolet and Robert Sedgewick, page 120 of Analytic combinatorics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009
“...being reminded, all too frequently, that the well known is often not generally known, let alone known well.”
— Alfred Jacobus (Alf) van der Poorten