I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
— Lord Kelvin
Interesting Numbers And Math quotations
Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.
He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.
Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful?
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.
In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.
Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.
If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero.
There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity.
But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity.
Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
C.S. Lewis says that fiction is able to sneak past the watchful dragons of religion. It becomes more powerful to speak in poetry. The song goes straight to the heart while the numbers and the math of it will never be able to reach that.
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.
We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
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.
Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well!
...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.
The control of large numbers is possible, and like unto that of small numbers, if we subdivide them.
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.
He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.
Indeed, nowadays no electrical engineer could get along without complex numbers, and neither could anyone working in aerodynamics or fluid dynamics.
Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?
In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.