Pastoral Resources

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

Mathematics was hard, dull work. Geography pleased me more. For dancing I was quite enthusiastic.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.

Mathematics is as old as Man.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Apart from two periods of intense study, of music between the ages of 12 and 14 and of mathematics between the ages of 14 and 16, I coasted, daydreaming, through most of my school years.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.