Math Quotes - Page 38

I'm a mathematician because I'm too slow to be a writer.

I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person...as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.

Mathematics is a language

The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver.

The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

Before one can generalize, formalize, and axiomatize, there must be a mathematical substance.

In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure.

All of mathematics is a tale about groups.

Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives.

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

Nature imitates mathematics.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers.

A GREAT discovery solves a great problem but there is a grain of discovery in any problem.

The principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible.

The transfinite numbers are in a sense the new irrationalities [ ... they] stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.