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Mathematicians
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Mathematicians are people who study (and usually teach and/or do research in) mathematics. Some are professionals who studied the topic (up to the end of the 19 th Century, thereafter a subtopic of...) at university and devote their life to it, like Bernhard Riemann, others are [serious] amateurs who take it up as a hobby passion apart from their day job, like Pierre de Fermat, who was a judge by vocation.
Quotations about mathematicians
The following are quotations about mathematicians, or by mathematicians.
- A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. (Addendum: American coffee is good for lemmas.)
- — Attributed to both Alfréd Rényi and Paul Erdős
- Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen; redet man mit ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anderes.
(Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite different.)- — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Each generation has its few great mathematicians...and [the others'] research harms no one.
- — Alfred W. Adler (1930– ), "Mathematics and Creativity"[1]
- In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.
- — Edgar Allan Poe, The purloined letter
- A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
- — G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
- Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
- It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.
Notes
- ↑ Alfred Adler, "Mathematics and Creativity," The New Yorker, 1972, reprinted in Timothy Ferris, ed., The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, Back Bay Books, reprint, June 30, 1993, p. 435.
External links
- James Dow Allen, The Greatest Mathematicians of All Time, ©1998-2010.
- Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician’s Lament, 2002.
- American Mathematical Society, Search the Combined Membership List (CML). (AMS | MAA | SIAM | AMATYC | AWM | CMS/SMC | MOS)
- Henry Cohn, Advice for amateur mathematicians on writing and publishing papers.
- MathSciNet® Mathematical Reviews — © Copyright 2016, American Mathematical Society.
