Math Is Like Quotes

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is 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.

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful.

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.

Math is like going to the gym for your brain. It sharpens your mind.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.