Quotable Mathematics

"As glimpsed by physicists, Nature's rules are simple, but also intricate: Different rules are subtly related to each other. The in...

"Nature builds up by her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty whi...

"In science, reason is the guide; in poetry, taste. The object of the one is truth, which is uniform and indivisible; the object of the...

"A physical law must possess mathematical beauty." (Paul A M Dirac, 1956) "It seems to be one of the fundamental features of ...

"A physical system is said to possess a symmetry if one can make a change in the system such that, after the change, the system is exac...

"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. [...]. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or ...

"Creativity is the heart and soul of mathematics at all levels. The collection of special skills and techniques is only the raw materia...

"So much of science consists of things we can never see: light ‘waves’ and charged ‘particles’; magnetic ‘fields’ and gravitational ‘fo...

"Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks." (John K Galbraith, ...

"One of the central problems studied by mankind is the problem of the succession of form. Whatever is the ultimate nature of reality (a...

"A transcendental number is defined as a number that isn’t the solution of any polynomial equation with integer constants times the x’s...

"In short, complex adaptive systems are characterized by perpetual novelty." (M Mitchell Waldrop, "Complexity: The Emerging S...

"Symmetry is evidently a kind of unity in variety, where a whole is determined by the rhythmic repetition of similar."  (George Sa...

"Today it is no longer questioned that the principles of the analysts are the more far-reaching. Indeed, the synthesists lack two thing...

"Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid a...

"By the word symmetry […] one thinks of an external relationship between pleasing parts of a whole; mostly the word is used to refer to...

"The world of ideas which it [mathematics] discloses or illuminates, the contemplation of divine beauty and order which it induces, the...

" And as the ideal in the whole of Nature moves in an infinite process toward an Absolute Perfection, we may say that art is in strict ...

"With every simple act of thinking, something permanent, substantial, enters our soul. This substantial somewhat appears to us as a uni...