James C. Maxwell Quotes

One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.

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

It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it.

I accept no principles of physics which are not also accepted in mathematics.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

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

I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.

Arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number.

And believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with the mathematical sciences, which proceed very cautiously and admit nothing as established until it has been rigorously demonstrated.

Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

Indeed, there is something to be said for the old math when taught by a poorly trained teacher. He can, at least, get across the fundamental rules of calculation without too much confusion. The same teacher trying to teach new math is apt to get across nothing at all.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them.

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.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.