I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.
Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?
Euler - The unsurpassed master of analytic invention.
The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it.
Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.
In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."
We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.
I'm an expert in higher level math. You + God = Enough
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.
