Algebra Quotes - Page 5

• Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package."

  Robert Kanigel

  Math, Ramanujan, Done

  Robert Kanigel (2016). “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”, p.349, Simon and Schuster

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• Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!

  Dusa McDuff

  Math, Talking, Ideas

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• There's nothing in your life you can't learn from, if you respond with the right attitude.

  Rick Warren

  Motivational, Attitude, Ifs

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• Combinatorics is an honest subject. No adèles, no sigma-algebras. You count balls in a box, and you either have the right number or you haven't. You get the feeling that the result you have discovered is forever, because it's concrete. Other branches of mathematics are not so clear-cut. Functional analysis of infinite-dimensional spaces is never fully convincing; you don't get a feeling of having done an honest day's work. Don't get the wrong idea - combinatorics is not just putting balls into boxes. Counting finite sets can be a highbrow undertaking, with sophisticated techniques.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Cutting, Math, Ideas

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• Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.

  George Eliot

  Love, Flower, Blessed

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.3798, Delphi Classics

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• We [he and Halmos] share a philosophy about linear algebra: we think basis-free, we write basis-free , but when the chips are down we close the office door and compute with matrices like fury.

  Irving Kaplansky

  Philosophy, Writing, Thinking

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• ... commutative algebra is a lot like topology, only backwards.

  John C. Baez

  Math, Topology, Backwards

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• How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

  Stephen Leacock

  Fall, Struggle, Math

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• Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

  John Backus

  Law, Understanding, Ordinary

  "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?". John Backus' 1977 Turing Award lecture, published in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 21, No. 8 (pp. 639-640), August 1978.

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• It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Science, Progress, Goes On

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• Of possible quadruple algebras the one that had seemed to him by far the most beautiful and remarkable was practically identical with quaternions, and that he thought it most interesting that a calculus which so strongly appealed to the human mind by its intrinsic beauty and symmetry should prove to be especially adapted to the study of natural phenomena. The mind of man and that of Nature's God must work in the same channels.

  Benjamin Peirce

  Beautiful, God, Nature

  "The American Mathematical Monthly: The Official Journal of the Mathematical Association of America, Volume 32". Book published by The Association (p. 6), 1925.

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• Standard mathematics has recently been rendered obsolete by the discovery that for years we have been writing the numeral five backward. This has led to reevaluation of counting as a method of getting from one to ten. Students are taught advanced concepts of Boolean algebra, and formerly unsolvable equations are dealt with by threats of reprisals.

  Woody Allen

  Education, Writing, Science

  Woody Allen (2007). “The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose”, Random House Incorporated

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• Hydrodynamics procreated complex analysis, partial differential equations, Lie groups and algebra theory, cohomology theory and scientific computing.

  Vladimir Arnold

  Lying, Groups, Analysis

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• Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.

  Beverly Cleary

  Mean, Problem, Seems

  Beverly Cleary, Paul O. Zelinsky (1995). “Strider”

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• Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Morality, Physics

  Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• A guy's calling to say he's failing algebra II. Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself. A woman calls and says her kids won't behave. Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself. A man calls to say his car won't start. Kill yourself. A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts. Kill yourself. She asks, "Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex? I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Kids, Men, Practice

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Survivor”, p.52, Random House

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• So what if I don't learn algebra?' 'Someday schools will be open again,' Mom said. 'Things will be normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.' 'That's never going to happen,' Jon said. 'And even if schools do open up somewhere, they're not going to open up here. There aren't enough people left.' 'We don't know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better.' 'I bet whoever they are, they aren't studying algebra,' Jon said.

  Susan Beth Pfeffer

  Mom, School, People

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• The voice belonged to Mr. Pzyrbovich, an algebra teacher who was always called Mr. P, for obvious reasons. He has a heavy accent, which a lot of kids said made him hard to understand, although to be fair some of these kids would have never understood algebra anyway.

  Dave Barry

  Teacher, Kids, Voice

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• Cam was so much clearer, easier to figure out. Like he was algebra and Daniel was calculus.

  Lauren Kate

  Easier, Figures, Calculus

  Lauren Kate (2011). “The Fallen Sequence: An Omnibus Edition”, p.203, Delacorte Press

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• They have the idea that non-commutative algebra should remind one of commutative algebra, but the former is more sophisticated. I believe that non-commutative algebra is just as simple, but it is different.

  Israel Gelfand

  Believe, Science, Simple

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• We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

  Stefan Zweig

  Feelings, Secret, Mind

  Stefan Zweig (2015). “The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, Journey into the Past”, p.144, Pushkin Press

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• Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Art, Hands, Ideas

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• I do not believe there is anything useful which men can know with exactitude that they cannot know by arithmetic and algebra.

  Nicolas Malebranche

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

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• Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been by slow degrees vouchsafed to man, and are still granted in these latter times by the Differential Calculus, now superseded by the Higher Algebra, all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient Mind from eternity.

  Mary Somerville

  Math, Men, Unity

  Kathryn A. Neeley, Mary Somerville (2001). “Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind”, p.180, Cambridge University Press

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• Text is linear; it is black and white; it doesn't zoom around the page in 3-D; it isn't intelligent by itself; in fact, in terms of immediate reaction it is quite boring. I can't imagine a single preliterate was ever wowed at the first sight of text, and yet text has been the basis of arguably the most fundamental intellectual transformation of the human species. It and its subforms, such as algebra, have made science education for all a plausible goal.

  Andrea diSessa

  Learning, Black And White, Intelligent

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