93 Inspiring Mathematics Quotes

Mathematics, often seen as the language of the universe, transcends mere numbers and equations to reveal profound truths and inspire wonder. Throughout history, mathematicians, philosophers, and thinkers have articulated their thoughts on this unique discipline, capturing the essence of mathematical beauty and its impact on our perception of reality. In this blog post, we have curated a collection of 93 inspiring mathematics quotes that celebrate the elegance, mystery, and intellectual thrill that math brings to our lives. Whether you are a seasoned mathematician or someone with an appreciation for the subject's intricacies, these quotes are sure to ignite your curiosity and appreciation for the mathematical world.

1. “[When asked why are numbers beautiful?]It’s like asking why is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.” - Paul Erdos

2. “Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.” - Maria Mitchell

3. “I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.” - Lord George Gordon Byron

4. “The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.” - Alain Badiou

6. “Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.” - Albert Einstein

7. “When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.” - Farkas Bolyai

8. “Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.” - Pierre Laplace

9. “The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.” - Roman Payne

10. “The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.” - Georg Simmel

11. “The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.” - Richard Preston

12. “The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

13. “My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.” - Georg Cantor

14. “In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.” - Immanuel Kant

15. “Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.” - Leonhard Euler

16. “I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.” - Erwin Schrödinger

17. “Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.” - Lord Kelvin

18. “Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.” - Roger Bacon

19. “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” - Werner Heisenberg

20. “All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.” - Sylvain Cappell

21. “I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.” - Roger Jones

22. “Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.” - Johannes Kepler

23. “Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.” - Nicolaus Copernicus

24. “I had a polynomial once. My doctor removed it.” - Michael Grant

25. “But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.” - Rene Decartes

26. “With me, everything turns into mathematics.” - René Descartes

27. “I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.” - Benjamin Moser

28. “There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that's because you're dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion. Uh, when you're dealing with something with certainty, like, y'know, science or logic, you don't have the--there's no wiggle room; that's why history is not filled with warring math cults, y'know, because you can settle the issue; you can prove something to be right or wrong, and that's the end of the argument: next case. Whereas, when you're dealing with faith, you can forever argue your point, or another point, because you're dealing with intangibles. Personally, I think, faith is what you ask of somebody when you don't have the goods to prove your point.” - Tom Quinn

29. “A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works.” - Bill Gaede

30. “A relativist is an individual who doesn't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.” - Bill Gaede

31. “A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic...” - Bill Gaede

32. “Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.” - Michael Crichton

33. “I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!” - Richard P. Feynman

34. “I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.” - Winston S. Churchill

35. “I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.” - C. S. Lewis

36. “Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.” - Deepak Chopra

37. “Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.” - Robert Langlands

38. “Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.” - G.H. Hardy

39. “When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. “Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers.” - R.M. ArceJaeger

41. “If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!” - Bill Gaede

42. “If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy)...” - Doug Pierce

43. “Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.” - Bill Gaede

44. “A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.” - Bill Gaede

45. “We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.” - Roger Penrose

46. “Düşün! Bize, matematik dünyasının kurgusal ve sonsuz olduğu öğretildi. Bunu kabul ederim, 1'den sonra 2 gelir dendi. Bunu da kabul ederim. Ama sonra, 1 ile 2 arasındaki sonsuzluğu düşündüm. Peki o nereye gitti? İrrasyonel sayılar varken bir sayıdan sonra diğer bir tam sayı nasıl gelebilir? Eğer 1'den sonra virgül konursa ve bunun da kıçına sonsuz sayı konabiliyorsa 2 nasıl gelir? İşte! Soru bu! Yanıtsız bir soru. Ve işte matematiğin hatası! Dolayısıyla matematik yok. Onun üzerine kurulmuş dünya düzeni de yok... Ama ben anlayabilirim. Anlayabilirim bu sorunu. Ve o zaman ortaya yaklaşık sayılar çıkar. Yani hiçbir sayı tam değildir. Hepsi tama yaklaşır. Ama varamaz. Demektir ki, 1,999...9'u bize 2 diye yutturmaya çalışan bir dünyanın çocuklarıyız. Ve dünya da aslında tam gibi görünürken, aslmda bir irrasyonellik harikası. İşte bunun için hayat yoktur. Olsa dahi o da irrasyoneldir! Yani anlamsızdır. Ne bir başlama nedeni, ne de bir oluş nedeni vardır. Evrende uçuşan kocaman bir irrasyonellik. Tabiî ki dünyanın bir anlamı olması gerekmiyor. Belki de onu anlamlandıran üzerinde yaşayan akıl sahibi yaratıklardır. Ama onların da bizi getirdiği nokta ortada!” - Hakan Günday

47. “Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?” - Paul Lockhart

48. “[Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.” - Paul Lockhart

49. “In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide -- a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world.” - Paul Lockhart

50. “Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.” - Paul Lockhart

51. “It is the story that matters not just the ending.” - Paul Lockhart

52. “So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a "poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps.” - Paul Lockhart

53. “The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might glimpse some kind of secret underlying truth, some sort of message from the gods.” - Paul Lockhart

54. “99 percent of all statistics only tell 49 percent of the story.” - Ron DeLegge II

55. “When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.” - Robert B. Reich

56. “College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.” - Bill Gaede

57. “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.” - Eugene Paul Wigner

58. “I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.” - Mark Twain

59. “Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.” - Yoko Ogawa

60. “If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.” - Gary William Flake

61. “Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.” - Haruki Murakami

62. “Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.” - James Gleick

63. “She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.” - Virginia Woolf

64. “It is the definition of the word 'object' which destroys all religions.” - Bill Gaede

65. “Existe una opinión generalizada según la cual la matemática es la ciencia más difícil cuando en realidad es la más simple de todas. La causa de esta paradoja reside en el hecho de que, precisamente por su simplicidad, los razonamientos matemáticos equivocados quedan a la vista. En una compleja cuestión de política o arte, hay tantos factores en juego y tantos desconocidos e inaparentes, que es muy difícil distinguir lo verdadero de lo falso. El resultado es que cualquier tonto se cree en condiciones de discutir sobre política y arte -y en verdad lo hace- mientras que mira la matemática desde una respetuosa distancia.” - Ernesto Sabato

66. “In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.” - James Henry Breasted

67. “Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.” - Brian Greene

68. “The language of categories is affectionately known as "abstract nonsense," so named by Norman Steenrod. This term is essentially accurate and not necessarily derogatory: categories refer to "nonsense" in the sense that they are all about the "structure," and not about the "meaning," of what they represent.” - Paolo Aluffi

69. “Mathematics is the art of explanation.” - Paul Lockhart

70. “Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. [...] Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.” - Bertrand Russell

71. “Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.” - C.S. Lewis

72. “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” - Bertrand Russell

73. “A brick can be used to represent the zero probability of this book being any good.” - Amy Riekhof

74. “Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppyyour mathematics is.” - Leslie Lamport

75. “Life is about solving for x” - Jane Lescarbeau

76. “It is an unfortunate fact that proofs can be very misleading. Proofs exist to establish once and for all, according to very high standards, that certain mathematical statements are irrefutable facts. What is unfortunate about this is that a proof, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly correct, does not in any way have to be enlightening. Thus, mathematicians, and mathematics students, are faced with two problems: the generation of proofs, and the generation of internal enlightenment. To understand a theorem requires enlightenment. If one has enlightenment, one knows in one's soul why a particular theorem must be true.” - Herbert S. Gaskill

77. “The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.” - Núria Añó

78. “Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers.” - Dejan Stojanovic

79. “One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.” - Albert Einstein

80. “It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?” - Neal Stephenson

81. “Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.” - Isaac Asimov

82. “They shouldn't be allowed to teach math so early in the morning.” - Kendare Blake

83. “Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture.” - Lawrence Young

84. “But that can never be," said Milo, jumping to his feet."Don't be too sure," said the child patiently, "for one of the nicest things about mathematics, or anything else you might care to learn, is that many of the things which can never be, often are. You see," he went on, "it's very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it's there, but you just don't know where — but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.” - Norton Juster

85. “Is everyone with one face called a Milo?""Oh no," Milo replied; "some are called Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things.""How terribly confusing," he cried. "Everything here is called exactly what it is. The triangles are called triangles, the circles are called circles, and even the same numbers have the same name. Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.""I never thought of it that way," Milo admitted."Then I suggest you begin at once," admonished the Dodecahedron from his admonishing face, "for here in Digitopolis everything is quite precise.” - Norton Juster

86. “Luck is the grand equalizer.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

87. “. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

88. “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” - Martin Nowak

89. “Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.” - Mark Z. Danielewski

90. “Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either--there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds. But that said, once you have a good grounding in it,you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.)” - Jim Butcher

91. “[...] provability is a weaker notion than truth” - Douglas R. Hofstadter

92. “The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing.[Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862]” - Rudolf Clausius

93. “A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives.” - Douglas R. Hofstadter