Quotes About Math

Two contrasting attitudes: non-math person: "Math is so abstract." i.e. "hard to understand" math person: We abstract *in order to understand.* Part of our job is to teach people this latter mentality.

You know, students who major in elementary education - they're going to be grade school teachers - they have the highest rates of math anxiety of any college major. And they bring that into the classroom. So you find students being introduced to math concepts by teachers who may have not only a lack of training but also a lack of enthusiasm about math.

There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.

To the extent math refers to reality, we are not certain to the extent we are certain, math does not refer to reality.

What if at school you had to take an 'art class' in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso? Would that make you appreciate art? Would you want to learn more about it? I doubt it..........but this is how math is taught and so in the eyes of most of us it becomes the equivalent of watching paint dry. While the paintings of the great masters are readily available, the math of the great masters is locked away.

President Obama said he plans on training 10,000 new math and science teachers. How about teaching math to that economic team of his?

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math.

I love music because it's so fecking brilliant. Music is math, and math is the structure of everything and pretty much perfect.

I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.

I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong.

My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.

Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.

I was told there would be no math

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics, a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant. A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. The Foundamental Law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin.

Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is what makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.

Who cares for Algebra?Who delights in solving math?I only want to live my lifeAlong the creative path.

I liked English and art and did a lot of painting. And for some reason I was good at math, but I wasn't an A student. I really had to work hard to get good grades.

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

100% of the people who give 110% do not understand math.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

What I really need is a woman who loves me for my money but doesn't understand math.

In art class at school we learned how to draw tanks and soldiers opening fire at [Iranian leader Ayatollah] Khomeini and his beard. They didn't teach us the names of the flowers that grew around us in the city - wild flowers of all kinds and all colors. The math teacher used to whip the kids with his trouser belt. My father was constantly violent toward my mother for the most trivial reasons.

In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.

I'm an expert in higher level math. You + God = Enough

At Harvard I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math.

Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.

What promotes math progress even more than new ideas are new technical tools and habits of thought that encapsulate existing ideas, so that insights of one generation become the instincts of the next.

Community is essential when it comes to successfully living out the Christian walk in a day-to-day context. So the math is simple: More community = More disciples.

The best therapy for emotional blocks to math is the realization that the human race took centuries or millennia to see through the mist of difficulties and paradoxes which instructors now invite us to solve in a few minutes.

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.

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in math—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.

A majority of students who come into community colleges are still stuck at high school level or remedial math. And when they take it in college, they still don't pass it. So the Carnegie Foundation got together and created two accelerated courses that focus on real-world applications of numbers like for health, for civics, for personal finance - concepts that you and I use every single day.

I was just kind of doing the math.

When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.

I was a normal human being, but I did like that. I read a lot. I also liked math and science.

My older brother was cool, so I was suddenly cool by association. And I totally dusted all my old math friends.

I am better at math than spelling.

All parents want to send their children to the best possible schools. But because a good school is a relative concept, a family cannot achieve its goal unless it outbids similar families for a house in a neighborhood served by such a school. Failure to do so often means having to send your kids to a school with metal detectors at the front entrance and students who score in the 20th percentile in reading and math. Most families will do everything possible to avoid having to send their kids to a school like that. But because of the logic of musical chairs, they're inevitably frustrated.

The average actor might only be able to book six to eight guest star jobs a year - that would be high. So when you start doing the math, you can't live on that in Los Angeles.

When I got to college, I was intending to study film. But I found that my brain was feeling mushy, so I took a few math classes. I started doing really well at them, and solving equations was this, like, drug rush.

I was never as focused in math, science, computer science, etcetera, as the people who were best at it. I wanted to create amazing screensavers that did beautiful visualizations of music. It's like, "Oh, I have to learn computer science to do that."

Sometimes we deliberate - for example when we plan a long trip or - if we are not math wizards - when we solve long division problems. However, if we deliberated every time we acted we would never get through the day. Most of the time, we act for reasons without deliberation. I am not just talking about cases of simple, habitual action, like brushing your teeth, but also about more sophisticated action.

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

People expect the math to be simplified, but I want to surprise them right from the start. When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.