William Rowan Hamilton Quotes

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.

The thing with mathematics is we keep thinking about how things work. And once you figure it out, you then see other things, connections and so on. And two weeks later it's so obvious that you could kick yourself for not having thought of it sooner. The high doesn't last! So you have to enjoy it as long as it does last.

I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Even God cannot make two times two not make four.

Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation. In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means.

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

There are men of a certain type of mind who are never wearied with gibing at mathematics, at mathematicians, and at mathematical methods of inquiry. It goes almost without saying that these men have themselves little mathematical bent. I believe this to be a general fact; but, as a fact, it does not explain very well their attitude towards mathematicians. The reason seems to lie deeper. How does it come about, for instance, that whilst they are themselves so transparently ignorant of the real nature, meaning, and effects of mathematical investigation, they yet lay down the law in the most confident and self-satisfied manner, telling the mathematician what the nature of his work is (or rather is not), and of its erroneousness and inutility, and so forth? It is quite as if they knew all about it. It reminds one of the professional paradoxers... They, too, write as if they knew all about it. Plainly, then, the anti-mathematician must belong to the same class as the paradoxer, whose characteristic is to be wise in his ignorance, whereas the really wise man is ignorant in his wisdom. ...What is of greater importance is that the anti-mathematicians sometimes do a deal of mischief. For there are many of a neutral frame of mind, little acquainted themselves with mathematical methods, who are sufficiently impressible to be easily taken in by the gibers and to be prejudiced thereby; and, should they possess some mathematical bent, they may be hindered by their prejudice from giving it fair development. We cannot all be Newtons or Laplace's, but that there is an immense amount of moderate mathematical talent lying latent in the average man I regard as a fact; and even the moderate development implied in a working knowledge of simple algebraical equations can, with common-sense to assist, be not only the means of valuable mental discipline, but even be of commercial importance (which goes a long way with some people), should one's occupation be a branch of engineering for example.

Like the crests on the heads of peacocks, like the gems on the hoods of the cobras, mathematics is at the top of the Vedanga sastras.

One occasionally hears the question, is mathematics invented or discovered?—or an answer. As David Wells points out... both answers... are appropriate. Once a game is invented, the consequences are discovered... as it would require a divine intelligence to know just from the rules how a complex game could best be played. When in practice rules are changed, one makes adjustments that will not alter the consequences too dramatically. Analogously, axioms are usually only adjusted and the altered consequences discovered.

The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. ...The conic sections, invented in an attempt to solve the problem of doubling the altar of an oracle, ended by becoming the orbits followed by the planets... The imaginary magnitudes invented by Cardan and Bombelli describe... the characteristic features of alternating currents. The absolute differential calculus, which originated as a fantasy of Reimann, became the mathematical model for the theory of Relativity. And the matrices which were a complete abstraction in the days of Cayley and Sylvester appear admirably adapted to the... quantum of the atom.

As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.

The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so us to make up the number 4.

Letting numbers take us where we can't go in person — whether that's to the top of a windmill or to the origin and borders of the universe — has been and still is one of humankind's favorite intellectual adventures.

Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746).

We should not believe... that commensurability is a quality of every magnitude as of all the numbers; and whoever has not investigated this subject, shows a gross and unseemly ignorance of what the Athenian Stranger says in the seventh treatise of the Book of the Laws, [namely], "And besides there is found in every man an ignorance, shameful in its nature and ludicrous, concerning everything which has the dimensions, length, breadth, and depth; and it is clear that mathematics can free them from this ignorance. For I hold that this [ignorance] is a brutish and not a human state, and I am verily ashamed, not for myself only, but for all Greeks, of the opinion of those men who prefer to believe what this whole generation believes, [namely], that commensurability is necessarily a quality of all magnitudes. For everyone of them says: "We conceive that those things are essentially the same, some of which can measure the others in some way or other. But the fact is that only some of them are measured by common measures, whereas others cannot be measured at all".