Mathematicians

"Mathematicians are used to game-playing according to a set of rules they lay down in advance, despite the fact that nature always writes her own. One acquires a great deal of humility by experiencing the real wiliness of nature."

"Quapropter bono christiano, sive mathematici, sive quilibet impie divinantium... cavendi sunt, ne consortio daemoniorum irretiant."

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

"I united the majority of well-informed persons into a club, which we called by the name of the Junto, and the object of which was to improve our understandings. ... The first members of our club were... Thomas Godfrey, a self-taught mathematician, and afterwards inventor of what is now called Hadley's dial; but he had little knowledge out of his own line, and was insupportable in company, always requiring, like the majority of mathematicians that have fallen in my way, an unusual precision in everything that is said, continually contradicting, or making trifling distinctions—a sure way of defeating all the ends of conversation. He very soon left us."

"Avec toute l’algèbre du monde on n’est souvent qu’un sot lorsqu’on ne sait pas autre chose. Peut-être dans dix ans la société tirera-t-elle de l’avantage des courbes que des songe-creux d’algébristes auront carrées laborieusement. J’en félicite d’avance la postérité; mais, à vous parler vrai, je ne vois dans tous ces calculs qu’une scientifique extravagance. Tout ce qui n’est ni utile ni agréable ne vaut rien. Quant aux choses utiles, elles sont toutes trouvées; et, pour les agréables, j’espère que le bon goût n’y admettra point d’algèbre."

"Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen; redet man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anders."

"To be a mathematician you must love mathematics more than family, religion, money, comfort, pleasure, glory. I do not mean that you must love it to the exclusion of family, religion, and the rest, and I do not mean that if you do love it, you'll never have any doubts, you'll never be discouraged, you'll never be ready to chuck it all and take up gardening instead. Doubts and discouragements are part of life. Great mathematicians have doubts and get discouraged, but usually they can’t stop doing mathematics anyway, and, when they do, they miss it very deeply. [...] Mind you, I am not recommending or insisting that you love mathematics. I am not issuing an order: “If you want to be a mathematician, start loving mathematics forthwith”—that would be absurd. What I am saying is that the love of mathematics is a hypothesis without which the conclusion doesn’t follow. If you want to be a mathematician, look into your soul and ask yourself how much you want to be one. If the wish isn’t very deep and very great, if it is not, in fact, maximal, if you have another desire that takes precedence, or even more than one, then you should not try to be a mathematician. The “should” is not a moral one; it is a pragmatic one. I think that you would probably not succeed in your attempt, and, in any event, you would probably feel frustrated and unhappy."

"The mathematician's best work is art, a high perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch one another."

"Mathematicians seem to have no difficulty in creating new concepts faster than the old ones become well understood."

"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning."

"Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was one which does not now seem very impressive; it was, that some people can do sums."

"Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted."

"These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience . . ."