#thematic

So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a "poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #reason #art

It is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician. ↗

— Augustus de Morgan

#easier #get #mathematician #round #square

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#blank #blank slate #doctrine #equals #fact

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable. ↗

— Abraham Robinson

#as far as #even #facts #far #i

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics. ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#clumsy #consider #elegance #essential #further

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations. ↗

— Stephen Wolfram

#been #describe #dominated #equations #exact

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics. ↗

— G. H. Hardy

#applied #distinctly #mainly #mathematical #mathematics

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ↗

— G. H. Hardy

#because #die #forgotten #ideas #languages

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality. ↗

— David Hilbert

#case #consists #contains #doing #finding

The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science. ↗

— David Hilbert

#branches #construction #developed #disclosed #does