Math Quotes - Page 23

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

Chaos umpire sits And by decision more embroils the fray by which he reigns: next him high arbiter Chance governs all.

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

The mathematical education of the young physicist [Albert Einstein] was not very solid, which I am in a good position to evaluate since he obtained it from me in Zurich some time ago.

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.

Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

When I originally entered UCLA, I had planned to go for a film major, but I kept finding myself taking math classes for fun, 'cause I missed them from high school!

By the end of an intense four years at UCLA, I had co-authored a new math proof, which the media, in fact, loved. As it turned out, math itself blazed my entry back into the spotlight and consequently into wonderful acting jobs like 'The West Wing' and others. You just never know, do you?

Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society.

Only in math can you buy sixty cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Today, over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. . .

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.

A painting is more than the sum of its parts

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?

I am big into aromatherapy.

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.

It is well known that the man who first made public the theory of irrationals perished in a shipwreck in order that the inexpressible and unimaginable should ever remain veiled. And so the guilty man, who fortuitously touched on and revealed this aspect of living things, was taken to the place where he began and there is for ever beaten by the waves.