Mathematics is one of the primary subjects on which the whole world is dependent. It is very hard for us to imagine a world without the subject of math. Math is a very beautiful subject, but at times, it becomes difficult for teachers to pass the same love and compassion that they have towards the subject to their students.
Math is one of the subjects that challenge students at every step. Thus, using math quotes in your everyday classes can help your students get a daily dose of motivation and excitement.
Throughout history, some of the world’s greatest minds have shared with us their wise words that are relevant to date. We have compiled a wonderful list of math quotes for teachers so that they can use them in their classes to motivate and inspire students.
The beauty of these math quotes is that they impart valuable wisdom that can remain with the students as well as any other person reading them.
Uplift, inspire, and sometimes make your students laugh with the collection of these famous math quotes!
Famous Math Quotes for Teachers
1. “Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.”
— Danica McKellar
2. “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”
— Albert Einstein
3. “Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.”
— Shakuntala Devi
4. “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.”
— Galileo Galilei
5. “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.”
— Paul Halmos
6. “Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
7. “Number rules the universe.”
— Pythagoras
8. “A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
— Leo Tolstoy
9. “Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has bequeathed to us by human agency.”
— Rene Descartes
10. “To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.”
— Richard Feynman
11. “Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.”
— Deepak Chopra
12. “Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.”
— Stefan Banach
13. “Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality.”
— Richard Courant
14. “We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and go away, but these will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always be mathematics.”
— Katherine Johnson
15. “What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.”
— Shakuntala Devi
16. “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
— Albert Einstein
17. “Mathematics is the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.”
— Marston Morse
18. “Mathematics is the music of reason.”
— James Joseph Sylvester
19. “Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
— John von Neumann
20. “Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
— Bertrand Russell
21. “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers”
— Richard Hamming
22. “I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.”
— John Forbes Nash
23. “Logic is the anatomy of thought.”
— John Locke
24. “I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
— Bertrand Russell
25. “Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.”
— David Hilbert
26. “Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.”
— Marie Henri Beyle
27. “It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.”
— Sofia Kovalevskaya
28. “I’ve always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing an idea.”
— N. R. Narayana Murthy
29. “Somehow it’s okay for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet, if I said ‘I never learned to read, they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
30. “A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.”
— Karl Weierstrass
31. “Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, computations, or algorithms: it is about understanding.”
— Willian Paul Thurston
32. “Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”
— Joseph Fourier
33. “Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”
— Dean Schlicter
34. “It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.”
— John Wesley Young
35. “God created everything by number, weight, and measure.”
— Isaac Newton
36. “Geometry existed before creation.”
— Plato
37. “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
— Mark Twain
38. “The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
— William James
39. “Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form because there is no other guidance we can have.”
— Charles Darwin
40. “I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.”
— Maya Lin
41. “Mathematics has beauty and romance. It’s not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It’s an extraordinary place; it’s worth spending time there.”
— Marcus du Sautoy
42. “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.”
— Georg Cantor
43. “To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They’re all creative expressions.”
— Sebastian Thrun
44. “The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.”
— Charles Caleb Colton
45. “Why do children dread mathematics? Because of the wrong approach. Because it is looked at as a subject.”
— Shakuntala Devi
46. “Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.”
— Sofia Kovalevskaya
47. “Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigor should be a signal to the historians that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.”
— W. S. Anglin
48. “One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.”
— Philip Davis
49. “Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can’t do in the real world.”
— Marcus du Sautoy
50. “If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.”
— Galileo Galilei
51. “There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics … It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty but that is just as true of the beauty of any kind, we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.”
— G. H. Hardy
52. “Mathematics, in general, is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.”
— Felix Klein
53. “The essence of Mathematics lies in its freedom.”
— Cantor
54. “All mathematical tools are relative and conditional.”
— C. P. Steinmetz
55. “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
— Albert Einstein
56. “With calculus as a key, mathematics can be successfully applied to the explanation of the course of nature.”
— Whitehead
57. “Just as a mountaineer climbs a mountain– because it is there, so a good mathematics student studies new material because it is there.”
— James B. Bristol
58. “One should study Mathematics because it is only through Mathematics that nature can be conceived in harmonious form.”
— Birkhoff
59. “He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks for the most part in vain.”
— D. Hilbert
60. “In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In Mathematics alone each generation builds a new story to the old structure.”
— Herman Hankel
Some Funny Math Quotes to Make Students Laugh
61. “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
— John von Neumann
62. “I am still waiting for the day I’ll use mathematics integration in real life.”
— Derrick Obedgiu
63. “That awkward moment when you finish a math problem and your answer isn’t even one of the choices.”
— Ritu Ghatourney
64. “If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then nine times out of ten it will.”
— Paul Harvey
65. “Mathematics consists of proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way.”
— George Polya
You may also like to read- Math jokes
Some More Famous Math Quotes
66. “Mathematics is like love; a simple idea, but it can get complicated.”
— Anonymous
67. “ Math is fun. It teaches you life and death information like when you are cold, you should go to a corner since it’s 90 degrees there.”
— Anonymous
68. “In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
— John von Neumann
69. “Five out of four people have trouble with fractions.”
— Steven Wright
65+ math quotes are a lot to get through. Read them once and choose your favorite ones. You can pick a single quote for every class of yours. You can also conduct an activity where you let your students decide their favorite math quotes from the given list and then they can post their favorite quotes in the classroom using their art and creativity.