Mathematical Aesthetics Quotes

Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is.

Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.

For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or to that of art.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and lofiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection.