Freeman Dyson Quotes

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

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

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.

I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.

When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician, but I had no idea what that entailed.

Early in my career, I wanted to be a mathematician.

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

I'm a mathematician and always have been, as far as I can remember. I don't remember when I first got involved with mathematics, but I think of myself always as a mathematician first.

Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?

I love that once you know the basic rules of maths, you can do whatever you want with it.

Mathematics is the gate and key to science.

What science can there be more noble, more excellent, more useful for men, more admirably high and demonstrative, than this of mathematics?

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

I just love math and most people don't.

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.