Some quotations may be more familiar than others, but they all indicate that many people have written about the fascination of mathematics as well as its usefulness.

Plato- "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here."
(Inscribed above the door of his Academy)

Plato
"Very unlike a divine man would be he who is unable to count one, two, three or to distinguish odd and even numbers... All freemen, I conceive, should learn as much of these branches of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns his alphabet. In that country, arithmetic games have actually been invented for the use of children, which they learn as a pleasure and amusement."

Aristotle
"There is no royal road to mathematics, you have to work at it."

Russell
"The whole of mathematics can be summed up is 'if p then q'."
"Mathematics, rightlv viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture."

Goethe
"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen. Whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different."

Hardy visiting Ramanujan who was ill
"You said that all numbers are interesting. I noticed that the number of my taxi was 1729? That seems a very dull number."

Ramanujan
"Ah, but it is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways- 1729 can be written as 1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed + 10 cubed

Izaac Walton
"Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt."

Einstein
"As far as the propositions of Mathematics refer to reality they are not certain, and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality."

Leonardo da Vinci "No human investigation can really be called a science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically."

Napoleon
"The advance and perfecting of mathematics is closelv joined to the prosperity of the nation."

Vedanga Jyotisa: 50OBC
"Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on the head of a snake, so is mathematics is at the head of all knowledge."

Pierre Fermat's "Last Theorem": written in a copy of Diophantus 'Algebra'
"it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written is the sum of two fourth powers, or, in general, for any number. I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." (found after his death, it has never been proved or disproved)

George Boole
"What I have called a solvent consists in an equation the roots of which ire 0 and 1. That 'logical equation' is x squared = x or otherwise x (I - x) = 0 and the 'psychological equation' is x + (not-x) = 1

Mary Boole: 1890
"Few mathematics teachers now are so conceited as not to know that they have a great deal to learn, and that their methods need revising and improving, but the majority ire seeking for improved methods of doing more of what they are already doing a great deal too much of."

Hardy: "A Mathematician's Apology" 1940
"The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful, the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a
harmonious way. Beauty is the first test,- there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics... It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is true of beauty of any kind- we may not know what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognising one when we read it."

Sir Isaac Newton
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Lucienne Felix: 1960
"Mathematics is not just a ready-made succession of simple ideas, easily expressed in a few words. It is a human activity which arises from experience, is created in the mind, and demands a special form of language"