QED

An engineer thinks that his equations are an approximation to reality.
A physicist thinks that reality is an approximation to his equations.
A mathematician doesn’t care.
Bron onbekend

Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it’s completely dark. You stumble around bumping into furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally after six months or so, you [...]

Numbers written on bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the universe.
Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, Pan (1982)

Counting is a less precise tool for infinite sets than for finite ones. The shepherdess who can count her flock of a hundred sheep will know if the wolf has taken one; but, if she has an infinite flock, she won’t notice until almost all of her sheep have been lost.
Peter J. Cameron, Combinatorics [...]

In de wiskunde heb je die koraalrifjes, die allemaal niks met elkaar te maken hebben tot er iemand van het ene naar het andere zwemt, en in de natuurkunde heb je van die scholen vissen, die allemaal zo nu en dan ineens van richting veranderen. Ik denk niet dat het een beter is dan het [...]

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
John von Neumann, in een lezing op de eerste meeting van de Association for Computing Machinery in 1947

Il apparut que, entre deux vérités du domaine réel, le chemin le plus facile et le plus court passe bien souvent par le domaine complexe.
Paul Painlevé, Analyse des travaux scientifiques (1900)
Een gelijkaardig citaat (“Le plus court chemin entre deux vérités dans le domaine réel passe par le domaine complexe.”) wordt vaak aan Jacques Hadamard toegeschreven, [...]

A person who can, within a year, solve x^2 - 92y^2 = 1 is a mathematician.
Brahmagupta

Our paper became a monograph. When we had completed the details, we rewrote everything so that no one could tell how we came upon our ideas or why. This is the standard in mathematics.
David Berlinski, “Black Mischief” (1988)

Old math teachers never die, they just tend to infinity.
Anoniem