Quotes About Mathematics

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.

Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data, brought together in the full light of demonstration, and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-"important" if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and "serious" expresses what I mean much better.

There are four great sciences, without which the other sciences cannot be known nor a knowledge of things secured ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics ... He who is ignorant of this [mathematics] cannot know the other sciences nor the affairs of this world.

To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.

As I considered the matter carefully it gradually came to light that all those matters only were referred to mathematics in which order and measurements are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw consequently that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole which gives rise to problems about order and measurement, restricted as these are to no special subject matter. This, I perceived was called 'universal mathematics'.

The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries - how mathematics is one of humanity's long continuous conversations with itself.

Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.

If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy.

A Noah's Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, 'Almost All Children Left Behind.'

Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.

When the mathematician says that such and such a proposition is true of one thing, it may be interesting, and it is surely safe. But when he tries to extend his proposition to everything, though it is much more interesting, it is also much more dangerous. In the transition from one to all, from the specific to the general, mathematics has made its greatest progress, and suffered its most serious setbacks, of which the logical paradoxes constitute the most important part. For, if mathematics is to advance securely and confidently, it must first set its affairs in order at home.

Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap.

Our teaching of mathematics revolves around a fundamental conflict. Rightly or wrongly, students are required to master a series of mathematical concepts and techniques, and anything that might divert them from doing so is deemed unnecessary. Putting mathematics into its cultural context, explaining what is has done for humanity, telling the story of its historical development, or pointing out the wealth of unsolved problems or even the existence of topics that do not make it into school textbooks leaves less time to prepare for the exam. So most of these things aren't discussed.

Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability

Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

Applied mathematics will always need pure mathematics just as anteaters will always need ants.

I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.

In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.

That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

Education is like a diamond with many facets: It includes the basic mastery of numbers and letters that give us access to the treasury of human knowledge, accumulated and refined through the ages; it includes technical and vocational training as well as instruction in science, higher mathematics, and humane letters.

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number.

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.

In mathematics, two angles that are said to coincide fit together perfectly. The word "coincidence" does not describe luck or mistakes. It describes that which fits together perfectly.

The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us.

Nature imitates mathematics.

Mathematics is the art of accurate reasoning on inaccurately-drawn figures... let that be our motto.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

The indispensability argument says (roughly) that if you have ample reason to accept an empirical scientific theory that makes indispensable use of mathematics, and that theory entails that numbers exist, then you have ample reason to accept that numbers exist. The argument affirms the antecedent of this conditional, and concludes that you have ample reason to believe that numbers exist. What is striking about this argument is that it seems to show that the empirical reasons that suffice for accepting a scientific theory also suffice for accepting a metaphysical claim.

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.

Unless the chemist learns the language of mathematics, he will become a provincial and the higher branches of chemical work, that require reason as well as skill, will gradually pass out of his hands.

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

When, therefore, I had long considered this uncertainty of traditional mathematics, it began to weary me that no more definite explanation of the movement of the world-machine established in our behalf by the best and most systematic builder of all, existed among the philosophers who had studied so exactly in other respects the minutest details in regard to the sphere.

Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.