Math Quotes

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.  (Roger Bacon)

Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the Universe--which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written.  It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.  (Galileo Galilei)

Thus all the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.  (James Clerk Maxwell)

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment....We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.  (Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics)

No knowledge can be certain, if it is not based upon mathematics or upon some other knowledge which is itself based upon the mathematical sciences.  (Leonardo da Vinci)