Albert Einstein Quotes

I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.

Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Projective geometry is all geometry.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect.

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.

Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.

We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.

Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry.

Mathematicians aren't motivated by money and material gain, or even by practical applications of their work. For us it's the glory of solving one of the great unsolved problems that have outwitted previous generations of mathematicians. …. Despite all the things we've discovered over the last 7 millennia, there are still many things we don't understand.

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Algebras deal not with laws of number, but with such laws of the human thinking machinery as have been discovered in the course of investigations on numbers. Plane geometry deals with such laws of thought as were discovered by men intent on finding out how to measure surface; and solid geometry with such additional laws of thought as were discovered when men began to extend geometry into three dimensions.

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

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 can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

The ludicrous state of solid geometry made me pass over this branch.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.