William Rowan Hamilton Quotes

In the pure mathematics, we contemplate absolute truths, which existed in the Divine Mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there, when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.

Magick, mysticism, and the mathematics are triplets.

I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers.

Yeah, Silver and his math are jokes, because math has a liberal bias. After all, math is the reason Mitt Romney's tax plan doesn't add up.

Advanced mathematics opens doors to many fields of study. More importantly, it expands the way you think.

Mathematical development in England was at a low ebb in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with Cambridge stagnating in the shadow of Newton, who had produced his mathematics nearly a century and a half earlier. This dead hand of tradition, which stifled much initiative and originality, was in sharp contrast to the situation in France.

They who study mathematiks only to fix their minds, and render them the steadyer to apply to all other things, as there are many who profess to do, are as wise as those who think by rowing boats, to learn to swim.

I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.

Susan: What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?
Phoebe: It is x minus y equals z plus y and things like that. And all the time you are saying they are equal, you feel in your heart, why should they be.

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

Prometheus: ...
List rather to the deeds
I did for mortals; how being fools before,
I made them wise and true in aim of soul. ...
But teaching you the intention of my gifts,
How first beholding, they beheld in vain,
And hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams,
Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time,
Nor knew to build a house against the sun...
But lived like silly ants, beneath the ground
In hollow caves unsunned. There, came to them
No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring...
But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,
Until I taught them how the stars do rise
And set in mystery, and devised for them
Number, the inducer of philosophies,
The synthesis of Letters, and, beside,
The artificer of all things, Memory,
That sweet Muse-mother.

All of mathematics is arbitrary. The very language of existence, mathematics, has no reason to be a certain way. But it is.

Math is perfect (in principle), but mathematicians are not (because they are humans), hence the mathematics that (human) mathematicians do is influenced by the weltanschauung of the people around them.

I like to find out as much about a mathematical object as possible, just as you might want to understand a person as well as possible.

There is no religious denomination in which so much sin has been committed through the misuse of metaphorical expressions as in mathematics.