Mathematical Physics

Bernhard Riemann

Mathematics

1826–1866

"Thesis. Finite, Representable. Antithesis. Infinite, System of Notions lying at the limit of the representable."

🇬🇧Freeman Dyson

Science

1923–2020

"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."

🇺🇸Martin David Kruskal

Mathematics

1925–2006

"Origami helps in the study of mathematics and science in many ways. … Using origami anyone can become a scientific experimenter with no fuss."

🇫🇷Joseph Fourier

Mathematics

1768–1830

"Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries."

William Rowan Hamilton

Science

1805–1865

"To admire is, to me, questionless, the highest pleasure of life."

🇺🇸Edward Witten

Science

b. 1951

"I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in the past."

🇷🇺Yuri I. Manin

Mathematics

1937–2023

"The twentieth century return to Middle Age scholastics taught us a lot about formalisms. Probably it is time to look outside again. Meaning is what really matters."

🇬🇧Roger Penrose

Mathematics

b. 1931

"Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation."

🇩🇪Emmy Noether

Mathematics

1882–1935

"A ring of polynomials in any number of variables over a ring of coeffcients that has an identity element and a finite basis, itself has a finite basis."

🇺🇸Richard Courant

Mathematics

1888–1972

"It becomes the urgent duty of mathematicians, therefore, to meditate about the essence of mathematics, its motivations and goals and the ideas that must bind divergent interests together."

David Hilbert

Mathematics

1862–1943

"Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics."

🇬🇧John Polkinghorne

Science

1930–2021

"God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show."

🇫🇷Augustin-Louis Cauchy

Mathematics

1789–1857

"As translated by Julio Antonio Gonzalo . The Intelligible Universe: An Overview of the Last Thirteen Billion Years. World Scientific. p. 301."

Robbert Dijkgraaf

Science

b. 1960

"Mirror symmetry is concerned with counting the number of holomorphic curves on Calabi-Yau manifolds, i.e. compact Kähler manifolds X with trivial canonical bundle KX."

🇺🇸Edward Nelson

Mathematics

Platonism

1932–2014

"The subject matter of mathematics is the expressions themselves together with the rules for manipulating them—nothing more."

🇺🇸John C. Baez

Mathematics

b. 1961

"Besides their possible role in physics, the octonions are important because they tie together some algebraic structures that otherwise appear as isolated and inexplicable exceptions."

🇺🇸Leonard Mlodinow

Mathematics

b. 1954

"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense."

🇺🇸Joseph Polchinski

Science

1954–2018

"In the open string the gauge charges are carried by the Chan-Paton degrees of freedom at the endpoints. In the closed string the charges are carried by fields that move along the string."

🇩🇪Hermann Minkowski

Mathematics

1864–1909

"The assumption of the contraction of the electron in Lorentz's theory must be introduced at an earlier stage than Lorentz has actually done."