"Quotes" for Teachers: Math and Science

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

-Albert Einstein

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.

-S. Gudder

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.

-Dean Schlicter

Trigonometry is a sine of the times.

-author unknown

Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.

-Carl Boyer (1949 calculus textbook)

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

-Eric Hoffer

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.

-Harold Marston Morse

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

-Mark Twain

In the binary system we count on our fists instead of on our fingers.

-author unknown

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

-author unknown

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.

-Philip J. Davis

Pure mathematics is the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub.

-Richard J. Trudeau

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.

-John Kemeny

Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.

-Leonard Adleman

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

-E.T. Bell

5 out of 4 people have trouble with fractions.

-Board in Danby NY

USA Today has come out with a new survey--apparently three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.

-David Letterman

I'm a mathematical optimist: I deal only with positive integers.

-Tendai Chitewere

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

-Charles R. Darwin

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

-Danica McKellar

Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems.

-Carl Pomerance

That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?

-Shmuel Weinberger

I certainly do care about measuring educational results. But what is an 'educational result?' The twinkling eyes of my students, together with their heartfelt and beautifully expressed mathematical arguments are all the results I need.

-Keith Devlin

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

-Conan Doyle

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

-Albert Einstein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

-Albert Einstein

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

-Buckminster Fuller

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

-Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

-Jules Henri Poincare

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

-Edwin Powell Hubble

Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope

-Theodore Roszak

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-Issac Asimov

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

-William Lawrence Bragg

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science is simply common sense at its best.

-Thomas Huxley

The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.

-Robert L. Park

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.

-Claude Levi-Strauss

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

-Martin H. Fischer

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.