Richard Hamming: Quotes about mathematics

Richard Hamming was American mathematician and information theorist. Explore interesting quotes on mathematics.

Richard Hamming: 180 quotes1 like

“Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the results they themselves seem to deny any meaning. Is that to be the mathematics we are to use to understand the world we live in?”

Richard Hamming

Source: Mathematics on a Distant Planet (1998), p. 645

“It is easy to measure your mastery of the results via a conventional examination; it is less easy to measure your mastery of doing mathematics, of creating new (to you) results, and of your ability to surmount the almost infinite details to see the general situation.”

Richard Hamming

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)