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Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) I am ill at these numbers. Hamlet.
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Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950) Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality. Preface to Back to Methuselah.
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Shaw, J. B. The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth. In N. Rose Mathematical Maxims and Minims, Raleigh NC:Rome Press Inc., 1988.
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Simmons, G. F. Mathematical rigor is like clothing; in its style it ought to suit the occasion, and it diminishes comfort and restrains freedom of movement if it is either too loose or too tight. In The Mathematical Intelligencer, v. 13, no. 1, Winter 1991.
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Slaught, H.E. …[E.H.] Moore ws presenting a paper on a highly technical topic to a large gathering of faculty and graduate students from all parts of the country. When half way through he discovered what seemed to be an error (though probably no one else in the room observed it). He stopped and re-examined the doubtful step for several minutes and then, convinced of the error, he abruptly dismissed the meeting — to the astonishment of most of the audience. It was an evidence of intellectual courage as well as honesty and doubtless won for him the supreme admiration of every person in the group — an admiration which was in no wise diminished, but rather increased, when at a later meeting he announced that after all he had been able to prove the step to be correct. The American Mathematical Monthly, 40 (1933), 191-195.
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Smith, Adam I have no faith in political arithmetic.
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Smith, David Eugene One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^i? = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit ‘God eternally geometrizes.’ In N. Rose Mathematical Maxims and Minims, Raleigh NC:Rome Press Inc., 1988.
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Smith, Henry John Stephen (1826-1883) It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility. In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Squared, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1972.
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So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.- Francis Bacon
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Soddy, Frederick (1877-1956) Four circles to the kissing come, The smaller are the benter. The bend is just the inverse of The distance from the centre. Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb There’s now no need for rule of thumb. Since zero bend’s a dead straight line And concave bends have minus sign, The sum of squares of all four bends Is half the square of their sum. Nature, v. 137, 1936.
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Somerville, Mary (1780-1872) Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been by slow degrees vouchsafed to man, and are still granted in these latter times by the Differential Calculus, now superseded by the Higher Algebra, all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient Mind from eternity. Martha Somerville (ed.) Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874.
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Spengler, Oswald (1880 -1936) The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics. The Decline of the West.
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St. Augustine (354-430) The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell. DeGenesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37 [Note: mathematician = astrologer]
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Steiner, G. For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution invested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is a higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery. The American Mathematical Monthly, v. 101, no. 9, November, 1994.
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Steinmetz, Charles P. Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.
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Sternberg, S. Kepler’s principal goal was to explain the relationship between the existence of five planets (and their motions) and the five regular solids. It is customary to sneer at Kepler for this. It is instructive to compare this with the current attempts to ‘explain’ the zoology of elementary particles in terms of irreducible representations of Lie groups.
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Stewart, Ian The successes of the differential equation paradigm were impressive and extensive. Many problems, including basic and important ones, led to equations that could be solved. A process of self-selection set in, whereby equations that could not be solved were automatically of less interest than those that could. Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1989, p. 39.
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Sullivan, John William Navin (1886-1937) Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds. Aspects of Science, 1925.
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Sun Tze (5th – 6th century) The control of large numbers is possible, and like unto that of small numbers, if we subdivide them. Sun Tze Ping Fa.
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Swift, Jonathan If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms … ‘A Voyage to Laputa’ in Gulliver’s Travels.
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