Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

I was always good at math and science and physics.

An ounce of algebra is worth of a ton of verbal argument.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

My dad is a mathematician; I think we both have that problem-solving, looking-for-patterns way of thinking.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

I always like a good math solution to any love problem.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.

Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

Mathematics is the gate and key to science.

By the help of God and with His precious assistance, I say that Algebra is a scientific art. The objects with which it deals are absolute numbers and measurable quantities which, though themselves unknown, are related to "things" which are known, whereby the determination of the unknown quantities is possible.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.