Math Quotes - Page 60

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

Mathematics has two faces: it is the rigorous science of Euclid, but it is also something else. Mathematics presented in the Euclidean way appears as a systematic, deductive science; but mathematics in the making appears as an experimental, inductive science. Both aspects are as old as the science of mathematics itself.

When introduced at the wrong time or place, good logic may be the worst enemy of good teaching.

At one point I wanted to work for NASA and be an astrophysicist, so I did physics, math, and chemistry before realizing I probably wasn't quite smart enough to do that. But I am still hugely interested in cosmology and astrophysics. That is my geeky subject area.

One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.

Mathematics is merely the means to a general and ultimate knowledge of man.

The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

Remember, a negative multiplied by a negative is only positive in maths, not in the real world

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow.

Many of the proofs in mathematics are very long and intricate. Others, though not long, are very ingeniously constructed.

How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

I'm no quitter, unless it comes to human relationships or math and science.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Mathematicians grow very old; it is a healthy profession. The reason you live long is that you have pleasant thoughts. Math and physics are very pleasant things to do.

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

Physics is much too hard for physicists.

What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow.

I was always good at math and science and physics.

America's demographic shift was obvious to everyone in the 2010 Census - but Republicans stubbornly rejected math, facts, and polls to their electoral peril. While Republicans tailored their platform by and for the pale stale and male, among us, Obama and Democrats are embracing America's diverse mosaic.

Decorating is like math, a game of adding and subtracting.

I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.

There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out. Of course, the aftermath was less pleasant. Once you'd told everyone you hated them and not to come after you, where exactly did you go?

The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.