Math Quotes - Page 55

On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.

In my own research when I'm working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I'm doing if I'm solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I'm constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind's-eye picture.

In fact, NSF was the leading successful efforts to improve U.S. math and science education long before the Department of Education was even created.

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

Our notion of symmetry is derived form the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only, not vertically nor in depth.

Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will.

All the aftermath that so frequently follows in the wake of war still confront the nation, and we now, as ever before, must hold fast to the ancient landmarks and see to it that all of these plagues that threaten so mightily shall be rendered harmless.

When I was young I liked taking tests. I happened to be good at it. Certain subjects came easily, like math. All the science stuff. I would just read the textbooks in the first few days of class.

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn't end up in computer science.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

Age is frequently beautiful, wisdom appearing like an aftermath.

There is an underlying timelessness in the basic conversation that is mathematics.

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.

To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.