Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

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

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

When I do the dodecahedron with the science audiences, I'll point out that I can only do three of the five forms with bubbles, since bubbles only join at three-way corners. The two I can't do are the ones that represent water and air. That always gets a big laugh from the mathematicians. They see the irony in it.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

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.

Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

Because Mathematicians frequently make use of Time, they ought to have a distinct idea of the meaning of that Word, otherwise they are Quacks.

Newton was a judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides

Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.

I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways."

I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.

...nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics.

Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

Mathematics is the surest way to immortality. If you make a big discovery in mathematics, you will be remembered after everyone else will be forgotten

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.