Mathematical Curiosity Quotes

A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.

Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.

The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.

I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game.

I've always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.

We might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement.

In mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically. ... [Mathematicians] have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. By their very nature they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it.

There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.

I made the first Moebius strip without knowing what it was.

Mathematicians aren't motivated by money and material gain, or even by practical applications of their work. For us it's the glory of solving one of the great unsolved problems that have outwitted previous generations of mathematicians. …. Despite all the things we've discovered over the last 7 millennia, there are still many things we don't understand.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

Growing up in Delhi, India, I did puzzles, explored numbers, and searched for patterns in everyday settings long before I ever saw an equation.

A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

I just toured around looking for fractals, and when I found something that had a scaling geometry, I would ask the folks what was going on - why they had made it that way.

Need a distraction today? Not only does 12 + 1 = 11 + 2, but the letters "twelve plus one" rearrange to give you "eleven plus two."

I would like to learn to play the cello. I would like to paint. I would like to fully understand the concept of pi.