Geometry Quotes - Page 8

• Any one who has stood upon a lofty summit and gazed over an inchoate tangle of deep canyons and cragged mountains, of sunlit lakelets and black expanses of forest, has become aware of a certain giddy sensation that there are no distances, no measures, simply unrelated matter rising and falling without any analogy to the banal geometry of breadth, thickness, and height.

  Bob Marshall

  Distance, Fall, Black

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• The best that Gauss has given us was likewise an exclusive production. If he had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. I do not hesitate to confess that to a certain extent a similar pleasure may be found by absorbing ourselves in questions of pure geometry.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, May, Pleasure

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• ... being perpetually charmed by his familiar siren, that is, by his geometry, he neglected to eat and drink and took no care of his person; that he was often carried by force to the baths, and when there he would trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and with his finger draws lines upon his body when it was anointed with oil, being in a state of great ecstasy and divinely possessed by his science.

  Plutarch

  Math, Oil, Fire

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• What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

  Antony Garrett Lisi

  Physics, Interaction, Particles

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• One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Dream, Long, Together

  Source: bigthink.com

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• For God is like a skilfull Geometrician.

  Thomas Browne

  God, Science

  Sir Thomas Browne (2012). “Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall”, p.19, New York Review of Books

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• The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

  Marcus du Sautoy

  Motivation, Inspiration, Language

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• Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Cosmos, Answers, Duration

  "The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

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• If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.

  Teju Cole

  Waiting, Want, Might

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

  Augustin-Louis Cauchy

  Science, Giving, Reason

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• To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

  Angela Carter

  Men, Two, Giving

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• The geometry reveals five development direction for applications (each with endless possibilities); dividing, dwelling, trestle, fenestration and artistic installation. I find these enabled designs so reflective of an ever-changing world where contextual factors and technological resources are shifting definitions of architecture, design, and the traditional boundaries between disciplines.

  Dror Benshetrit

  Dwelling, Discipline, Design

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.

  John Kennedy Toole

  United States, Needs, Taste

  John Kennedy Toole (1980). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.23, Dubois Publishing

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• If I died, would it get me out of my geometry test tomorrow? One could only hope.

  P. C. Cast

  Tests, Tomorrow, Ifs

  P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast (2013). “House of Night Series”, p.11, Macmillan

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• But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation.

  Neal Stephenson

  Suicidal, Cereal, Long

  "Cryptonomicon". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

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• Challenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency's deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology-engineering-would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines with abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition-physical law, precision design, and testing-must defy chaos.

  William E. Burrows

  Believe, Technology, Agency

  William E. Burrows (2010). “This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age”, p.560, Modern Library

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• [On Archimedes mathematical results:] It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanation... No investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen you immediately believe you would have discovered it.

  Proclus

  Believe, Simple, Discovery

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• Books, Manuals, Directives, Regulations. The geometries that circumscribe your working life draw norrower and norrower until nothing fits inside them anymore.

  Lord Byron

  Book, Regulation, Fit

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• It turns out that hyperbolic structures are very common in nature, and the place where lots of people encounter them is coral reefs. Sea slugs, and a lot of other organisms with frilly forms, are biological manifestations of hyperbolic geometry, which is also found in the structure of lettuce leaves and kales, and some species of cactus.

  Margaret Wertheim

  People, Common, Manifestation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid.
  As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain.

  Nikolai Lobachevsky

  Imperfection, Effort, Transition

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• 'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Science, Boys

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.73, North Atlantic Books

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• Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.

  Neal Stephenson

  Eye, Men, Knees

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• His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.

  Hermann Hesse

  Taken, Circles, Full Circle

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• The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry... The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Understanding, Mind, Female

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• The present author confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art ...
  A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves

  Julian Coolidge

  Art, Curves, Branches

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