Mathematics Quotes – Insights and Wisdom

"Planning replaces coincidence with error. From error we can learn, from coincidence we cannot."

Prof. Dr. Werner Kirsch

"If you calculate everything, nothing succeeds."

Romano Prodi

"Mathematics is the perfect way to fool oneself."

Albert Einstein

"I confess that I cannot imagine how any human being, in his proper senses, can believe that the Sun is stationary when, with his own eyes, he sees it revolving around the heavens, nor how he can believe that the Earth, on which he stands, is whirling with the speed of lightning around the Sun, when he feels not the slightest motion."

David Wardlow Scott

"A sphere where people on the other side live with their feet above their heads, where rain, snow and hail fall upwards, where trees and crops grow upside-down and the sky is lower than the ground? The ancient wonder of the hanging gardens of Babylon dwindle into nothing in comparison to the fields, seas, towns and mountains that pagan philosophers believe to be hanging from the earth without support!"

Lacantius

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

Nikola Tesla

"“The [Theory of Relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.”"

Nikola Tesla

"While I was thinking of this problem in my student years, I came to know the strange result of Michelson’s experiment. Soon I came to the conclusion that our idea about the motion of the Earth with respect to the ether is incorrect, if we admit Michelson’s null result as a fact. This was the first path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment, though the Earth is revolving around the Sun."

Albert Einstein

"I have known, too, for a long time, that we have no arguments for the Copernican system, but I shall never dare to be the first to attack it. Don’t msh into the wasp’s nest.
You will but bring upon yourself the scorn of the thoughtless multitude. If once a famous astronomer arises against the present conception, I will communicate, too, my observations; but to come forth as the first against opinions which the world has become fond of – I don’t feel the courage"

Alexander von Humboldt

"Mathematics is often invoked for things that could just as well be presented in plain, understandable language—and sometimes even for things that are deliberately not stated too clearly, because otherwise it would quickly become apparent what nonsense lies behind them."

Paul Krugman

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Albert Einstein

"We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton’s theory of gravity, and the difficulty increases with the number of bodies and the complexity of the theory. … We already know the laws that govern the behaviour of matter under all but the most extreme conditions. In particular, we know the basic laws that underlie all of chemistry and biology. Yet we have certainly not reduced these subjects to the status of solved problems…"

Stephen W. Hawking

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

Albert Einstein

"It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"To fanciful minds and theoretical speculators, the so-called "science" of modern astronomy furnishes a field, unsurpassed in any science for the unrestrained license of the imagination, and the building up of a complicated conjuration of absurdities such as to overawe the simpleton and make him gape with wonder"

Thomas Winship

"A physical law must possess mathematical beauty,"

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

"Sometimes it’s the people no one can imagine doing things no one can imagine doing."

Alan Mathison Turing

"What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean."

Isaac Newton