If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how

complicated life is. ~John Louis von Neumann

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the
window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again
and see how it comes out this time. ~Carl Sandburg

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ~Albert Einstein

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose. ~Albert
Einstein

Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero. ~Author Unknown

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to
human affairs. ~Isaac Barrow

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my
answers literally. ~Calvin Trillin

I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure. ~Stanislaw J.
Lec, More Unkempt Thoughts

If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido
only two of them. ~Phil Pastoret

[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as
squaring the circle and trisecting an angle. ~Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary

"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;" I need hardly point out to you that this
calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual

equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I
would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the
erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a
man, And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something
must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre. ~Charles Babbage, letter to Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, about a couplet in his "The Vision of Sin"

Math is radical! ~Bumper Sticker

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations,
arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed
insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as
they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into
concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a
sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.
~Gregory Benford, Timescape

It is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class.
~Author Unknown

If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. ~Author Unknown

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head. ~Carl Sandburg,
"Arithmetic"

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till
you get the answer. ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi. ~Richard
Preston

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that
mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes. ~Eric T. Bell, The Development of

Mathematics

So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit
be called away never so little, he must begin again. ~Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated
things simple. ~S. Gudder

The human mind has never invented a labor-saving machine equal to algebra. ~Author
Unknown

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they
may always advance and can never recede. ~Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. ~Dean Schlicter

It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank
accountants. ~Samuil Shchatunovski

Trigonometry is a sine of the times. ~Author Unknown

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange
wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the
maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere. ~W.S. Anglin

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~Paul Erdos

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge
from the goading urgency of contingent happenings. ~Alfred North Whitehead

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace
of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, "refuge from the
goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present
to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events. ~Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western
Culture

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms. ~Carl Boyer,

1949, calculus textbook

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so
that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
~Eric Bell, The Search for Truth

Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is. ~Author Unknown

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. ~Eric
Hoffer, Reflections On The Human Condition

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics. ~William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence
either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic. ~Bertrand Russell

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is
counting. ~Gottfried Leibniz

How many times can you subtract 7 from 83, and what is left afterwards? You can subtract it as
many times as you want, and it leaves 76 every time. ~Author Unknown

To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense
thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and
incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid
images and provocative ideas. ~Ivars Peterson

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.
~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same
madness and genius. ~Harold Marston Morse

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics. ~Gregory Bateson

Everybody who knew anything about ciphering was called in to consider it. A young man from a
high school near here, who made a specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily
tell how long a shadow a nine-pound ground-hog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37 minutes P.M.,
on ground-hog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak., provided latitude and longitude and an
irregular mass of red chalk be given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests
of trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the Exposition Building with
figures and then went away. ~Bill Nye, "Seeking to be Identified," Nye and Riley's Railway
Guide by Edgar W. Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, 1888

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable
subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. ~Robert
Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

You may be an engineer if your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the
decimal point in the right place. ~Author Unknown

The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the

exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very
definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and
keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to
look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions. ~Ronald L. Graham

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the
thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone
would occupy me eight million years. ~Mark Twain

Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife - what's the answer to that? ~Lewis
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal. ~Tobias Dantzig

Although he may not always recognize his bondage, modern man lives under a tyranny of
numbers. ~Nicholas Eberstadt, The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule

The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and
Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination. ~Thomas Hill

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26,
"Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be
sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation
as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or
50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from
the Sun, so we can ignore that.... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where
the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50
times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation,
(H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell
cannot be computed.... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall
have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone
means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that
Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. ~From Applied Optics, vol. 11, A14, 1972

I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and
no vagueness.... ~Stendhal (Henri Beyle), The Life of Henri Brulard

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, Sidelights on Relativity

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically. ~Albert
Einstein

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician. ~Paul Dirac

To all of us who hold the Christian belief that God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about
God, and mathematics is a branch of theology. ~Hilda Phoebe Hudson

[T]he different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

~Lewis Carroll

[G]eometry is not true, it is advantageous. ~Henri Poincar

Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling. ~Author Unknown

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we
know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. ~Bertrand Russell

God is real, unless declared integer. ~Author Unknown

If a healthy minded person takes an interest in science, he gets busy with his mathematics and
haunts the laboratory. ~W.S. Franklin

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. ~Arthur Stanley

Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

There was a young man from Trinity,

Who solved the square root of infinity.
While counting the digits,
He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
~Author Unknown

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence
and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their
discoverers... ~Heinrich Hertz

In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers. ~Author Unknown

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
~Author Unknown

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. ~Euclid

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established
another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.
~Hermann Hankel

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert
coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two
makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is
sometimes a very charming thing too. ~Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

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

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of
mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting. ~Ernst Mach

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the
rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding. ~Percy William Bridgman, The Way Things
Are

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That's subtraction. ~Mae
West

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each
number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example.
Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who
won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman
who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland
figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation....
~Paul Auster, The Music of Chance

Why do we believe that in all matters the odd numbers are more powerful? ~Pliny the
Elder, Natural History

Uneven numbers are the gods' delight. ~Virgil, The Eclogues

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of
blooming into beautiful theories. ~Philip J. Davis

Pure mathematics is the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble
than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes
did it in a bathtub. ~Richard J. Trudeau, Dots and Lines

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or
with the whole accidental universe - because like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

~Bertrand Russell, 1912

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of
civilization. ~John Kemeny

Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can
count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so. ~Robertson Davies, "Of
the Conservation of Youth," The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

MEDIUM

HARD

EASY