Mathematics is everywhere and we all learned it at some point, but what is mathematics, really? A search on the internet will yield many different interpretations. According to Google, mathematics is “the abstract science of number, quantity, and space.” Here is a collection of how some of history’s greatest minds described mathematics.
An intellectual game
“Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”—David Hilbert
“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
“Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.”—Vi Hart
“Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.”—Plato
“Mathematics is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.”—William Woods Worth
A tool for the sciences
“Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.”—Paul Dirac
“Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.”—Max Tegmark
“Mathematics serves as a handmaiden for the explanation of the quantitative situations in other subjects …”—H. F. Fehr
“In order to understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”—Galileo
A search for pattern, order, and structure
“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
“Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”—Joseph Fourier
“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”—Dean Schlicter
Logic and reasoning
“All Mathematics is Symbolic Logic.”—Bertrand Russell
“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” –Albert Einstein
“Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.“—Tobias Dantzig
Which do you believe best describes math?
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