Equations Quotes

• I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Understanding, Property

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• It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

  Paul Dirac

  Mathematical Equations, Important, Fit

  "Magic numbers: can maths equations be beautiful?" by Ian Sample, www.theguardian.com. November 21, 2016.

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• Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Years, Theory Of Evolution, Diversity

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• What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.

  Adam Braun

  Inspiring, Uplifting, Art

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• Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

  Bruce Schneier

  Thinking, Data, Information

  Bruce Schneier (2014). “Bruce Schneier on Trust Set”, p.552, John Wiley & Sons

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• All the standard equations of mathematical physics can be separated and solved in Kerr geometry.

  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

  Physics, Standards, Mathematical

  "Proceedings of the Gibbs Symposium: Yale University, May 15-17, 1989" by D. G. Caldi, ‎George D. Mostow, (p. 230), 1989.

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• Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.

  Paul Dirac

  Science, Anxiety, Feelings

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• You know the best thing about competition? There's this whole strategy game, and when it all works out its like solving that hard math equation. You finally get the answer and you're so happy.

  Shaun White

  Math, Games, Work Out

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• Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.

  Neil Peart

  Running, Romance, Three

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• Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations.

  Stephen Hawking

  Beautiful, Simple, Connections

  "Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'". Interview with Ian Sample, www.theguardian.com.

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• When the Constitution gave us the right to bear arms, it also made us responsible for using them properly. It's not fair of us as citizens to lean more heavily on one side of that equation than on the other.

  Jesse Ventura

  Citizens, Arms, Sides

  Jesse Ventura (2000). “I Ain't Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up”, p.37, Villard

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• Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Leadership, Responsibility

  Albert Einstein (1970). “Albert Einstein: philosopher-scientist”

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• I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

  Will Smith

  Heart, Trying, Looks

  "Mr. and Mr. Smith: Will and Jaden Psych Up for After Earth". Interview with Claire Hoffman, www.vulture.com. May 26, 2013.

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• The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

  George Perkins Marsh

  Life, Nature, Ocean

  George Perkins Marsh (1864). “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action”, p.103, New York : C. Scribner

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• The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

  Paul Dirac

  Law, Too Much, Chemistry

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.391, Cambridge University Press

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• There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

  Gregory Benford

  Real, Math, Iron

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• Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of water; in male and female; in the equation of quantity and quality; in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole an

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Animal, Light, Ebb And Flow

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.137, Penguin

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• To me, drum soloing is like doing a marathon and solving equations at the same time.

  Neil Peart

  Marathon

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• Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsôt has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Intelligent, Ideas

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• Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

  David H. Hubel

  Science, Thinking, Numbers

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• My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

  Bill Bryson

  Science, Work Out, Royal

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• It was basic research in the photoelectric field-in the photoelectric effect that would one day lead to solar panels. It was basic research in physics that would eventually produce the CAT scan. The calculations of today's GPS satellites are based on the equations that Einstein put to paper more than a century ago.

  Barack Obama

  Cat, Science, Gps

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• But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

  Philip Pullman

  Science, Thinking, Squares

  "Northern Lights". Book by Philip Pullman, 1995.

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• Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Nature, Science, Simple

  Murray Gell-Mann's speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1969.

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• A good deal of my research in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problem, but simply examining mathematical equations of a kind that physicists use and trying to fit them together in an interesting way, regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later to have an application. Then one has good luck. At age 78.

  Paul Dirac

  Good Luck, Science, Mathematical Equations

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