Paul Dirac Quotes

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.

When something is beautiful in math, everything is just perfectly lined up, and you see through sheer thought that something really beautiful can take place.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius.

Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

The beauty of cricket is that there are so many different opinions as to the best way to do something and at times it is easier to see something when you're not emotionally involved in the game and not responsible for the decision. You can go and have a cup of tea and look at it from a different point of view.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

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

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

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

To speak freely of mathematics, I find it the highest exercise of the spirit; but at the same time I know that it is so useless that I make little distinction between a man who is only a mathematician and a common artisan. Also, I call it the most beautiful profession in the world; but it is only a profession.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.