Maryam Mirzakhani Quotes

I got good grades in math, but I never really enjoyed it. My favorite part of math was algebra, but geometry was the worst.

I'd been doing projects outdoors for the public. I made pigeons eat geometry by putting bread out in rhomboids and triangles. I don't know if this activity made sense, but the work was available.

Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.

I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.

If it is not now the time to study Geometry, when will it be?

Approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone ...

It was hard to see the ‘art’ because everything partook of the art. Even the victrola had been painted so as to be in harmony. I must have missed a lot, because it was all one big decor, and the things in the foreground were lost against the things behind. But behind all was the wall running from one window to the other and at a certain spot Mondrian had tacked on it rectangles of the primary colors, and black, gray + white. In fact there were several whites, some shiny some matte.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

I've always had a great feel for space and how objects occupy it.

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.

On good days, I've done bubbles with as many as 38 faces - a row of pentagons, a row of hexagons, and another row of pentagons on bottom.

If you look at the soap bubbles in the sink when you're doing dishes, you'll see the incredible diversity of shapes in there. There are cubes in there; there are decahedrons and tetrahedrons; there are odd, irregular shapes without names, you know.

Indeed, it is a proven mathematical theorem that a doughnut is topologically distinct from a sphere.

I took mechanical drawing, geometry and typing at high school, the latter because that is what they did with smart girls in those days!

I think I still like science and art better, but geometry is a big improvement over algebra.

Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.

The centre of gravity of any parallelogram lies on the straight line joining the middle points of opposite sides.

The arithmetical symbols are written diagrams and the geometrical figures are graphic formulas.

As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.

Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.

Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

Geometry is the foundation of all painting.