How happy is the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

—W. H. Auden

TOPICS: mathematicians, reputation

Mathematicians are like lovers…Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must grant him also, and from this consequence another.

—Bernard de Fontenelle

TOPICS: humor, mathematicians

A  mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

—Paul Erdös

TOPICS: humor, mathematicians

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

—Gottlob Frege

TOPICS: philosophy, mathematicians

Mathematicians are a species of Frenchmen: if you say something to them they translate it into their own language and presto! It is something entirely different.

—Johann Wolfgang Goethe

TOPICS: mathematicians, humor

A  mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

—Godfrey Harold Hardy

TOPICS: mathematicians, art

Mathematicians create by acts of insight and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

—Morris Kline

TOPICS: mathematicians, intuition, logic

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

—Sofia Kovalevskaïa

TOPICS: mathematicians, poetry

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters—having once tasted of this food they can never give it up.

—Leopold Kronecker

TOPICS: number theory, mathematicians

Mathematicians study structure independent of context, and their science is a voyage of exploration through all the kinds of structure and order which the human mind is capable of discerning.

—Charles Pinter

TOPICS: structure, mathematicians

The future mathematician…should solve problems, choose the problems which are in his line, meditate upon their solution, and invent new problems. By this means, and by all other means, he should endeavor to make his first important discovery: he should discover his likes and dislikes, his taste, his own line.

—George Pólya

TOPICS: mathematicians, problems

To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.

—Bertrand Russell

TOPICS: philosophy, mathematicians

A  mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.

—Karl Weierstrass

TOPICS: mathematicians, poetry

He is very intelligent but he is not a mathematician: this as you know is a great defect.

—Blaise Pascal

TOPICS: mathematicians, intelligence

SOURCE: From a letter of Pascal to Fermat