Decimals Quotes

• All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Life, Age, Born

  Sri Aurobindo (1994). “Gems from Sri Aurobindo, 2nd Series”, p.136, Lotus Press

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• I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.

  Bill Nye

  Real, Fall, Black And White

  "Bill Nye the Science Guy: Don't Worry, Your Phone Isn't Making You Dumb". Interview with Wilson Rothman, gizmodo.com. March 19, 2010.

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• I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Believe, Humor, Economist

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• Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

  Tom Lehrer

  Funny, Science, Technology

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• Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

  Brian Selznick

  Book, World, Able

  Brian Selznick (2015). “Wonderstruck”, p.221, Scholastic

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• I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Wall, Science, Numbers

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.301, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Memories, Writing, Lines

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• The Dewey decimal system really works. So that's all I needed to know. Elementary school taught me that.

  Michelle Rodriguez

  School, Taught, Needed

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• Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

  Daniel Tammet

  Beautiful, Unique, Symphony

  Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

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• He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad.

  Brian Selznick

  Mom, Dream, Dad

  Brian Selznick (2015). “Wonderstruck”, p.221, Scholastic

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• Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don't), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, Heaven, Jupiter

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• I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

  Sylvia Plath

  Numbers, Perfectly Good, Gold

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• Part of my job is to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.

  Neal Shusterman

  Jobs, Book, Kids

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• I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.

  Agatha Christie

  Education, Father, Math

  Agatha Christie (1991). “Agatha Christie: An Autobiography”, Berkley Publishing Group

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• ... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Math, Men, Years

  Inaugural Address as Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, Oct. 1871

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• There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…” Uncle Will frowned. “Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?” “No. But I can recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.” “I weep for the future.” “There’s where the martinis come in.

  Libba Bray

  Uncles, Book, School

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• It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

  Will Durant

  Philosophy, India, Chess

  "The Case for India". Book by Will Durant, 1930.

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• The standard model gives us an accuracy of ten decimal digits, this is an amazing success that has never been achieved before in science.

  Nathan Seiberg

  Science, Giving, Mathematics

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• All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

  John Tukey

  Different, Asking, World

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• Ten decimal places of π are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circumference of the visible universe to a quantity imperceptible to the most powerful microscope.

  Simon Newcomb

  Powerful, Giving, Earth

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• It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities.

  David Elkind

  Children, Teaching, Mean

  David Elkind (1995). “TIES THAT STRESS”, p.131, Harvard University Press

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• For the record, do I know anyone not a demon or a freak?” – Nick “Yes, you do. Not sure if Bubba and Mark go into the latter or not, though. I’m too tired to mentally categorize them. You figure it out, and I’ll go with your Dewey decimal.” – Caleb

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Tired, Records, Freak

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2016). “Chronicles of Nick”, p.497, St. Martin's Griffin

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• It seemed as though the main framework had been put together once and for all, and that little remained to be done but to measure physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal point.

  William Cecil Dampier

  Together, Done, Littles

  William Cecil Dampier Dampier-Whetham M.A., F.R.S. (1931). “A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy & Religion”

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• Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

  Randall Jarrell

  Believe, Writing, Two

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "A Note on Poetry" (p. 50), 1980.

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• I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.

  Daniel Tammet

  Numbers, Mind, Shapes

  "This much I know" by John Hind, www.theguardian.com. January 31, 2009.

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