Math Quotes - Page 23

• Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.

  Paul Erdos

  Problem, Ready, Mathematics

  27 Copy quote

• To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciences is to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls.

  Pafnuty Chebyshev

  Demand, Cows, Bulls

  12 Copy quote

• The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

  Oswald Spengler

  Art, Imagination, Style

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1950). “Form and actuality”

  43 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

  Norbert Wiener

  Success, Games, Chess Game

  "Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth". Book by Norbert Wiener, 1964.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• . . . She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complimentary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Men, Easy, Said

  Margaret Mitchell (1975). “Gone With the Wind”, MacMillan Publishing Company

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.

  Ernst Mach

  Life, Circles, Pay

  Ernst Mach (2012). “Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry”, p.45, Springer Science & Business Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Life, Truth, Suggestions

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Spending time with math people is a lot of fun. As a result of the play, I've had semi-drunken dinners with mathematicians all over the country. I recommend the experience.

  David Auburn

  Country, Fun, Play

  11 Copy quote

• There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.

  Jo Boaler

  Education, Teacher, Ideas

  Jo Boaler (2015). “What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success”, p.5, Penguin

  78 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Beauty, Truth, Form

  8 Copy quote

• All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Beauty, Nature, Law

  "Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions". Book by Joseph Peter Stern, p. 84, 1959.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Silicon Valley, "the largest legal creation of wealth in history," was built largely by unprofessional amateurs using math, sand, and the institutions of freedom. The Soviet Union had the greatest mathematicians on earth, and plenty of sand, but without the institutions of freedom their brilliant mathematicians were not empowered to create those devices that are changing the world.

  Michael Strong

  Freedom, Business, Valleys

  Michael Strong, John Mackey (2009). “Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World?s Problems”, p.60, John Wiley and Sons

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To throw in a fair game at Hazards only three-spots, when something great is at stake, or some business is the hazard, is a natural occurrence and deserves to be so deemed; and even when they come up the same way for a second time if the throw be repeated. If the third and fourth plays are the same, surely there is occasion for suspicion on the part of a prudent man.

  Gerolamo Cardano

  Business, Men, Games

  4 Copy quote

• Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

  Douglas Adams

  Time, Science, Numbers

  Douglas Adams (2010). “The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.427, Del Rey

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Long, Worry

  4 Copy quote

• Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Time, Mind, Age

  14 Copy quote

• Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced . . . the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously . . . this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work. . . .

  Andre Weil

  Time, Work, Names

  Andre Weil (2012). “The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician”, p.91, Birkhäuser

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Feelings, Lectures, Helping

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.135, Cambridge University Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

  Hermann Weyl

  Truth, Ideas, Feelings

  Hermann Weyl (2013). “Levels of Infinity: Selected Writings on Mathematics and Philosophy”, p.33, Courier Corporation

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

  Ernst Mach

  Views, Uncomfortable Feeling, Feelings

  6 Copy quote

• Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, because they want to comprehend at a glance and are not used to seeking for first principles. Those, on the other hand, who are accustomed to reason from first principles do not understand matters of feeling at all, because they look for first principles and are unable to comprehend at a glance.

  Blaise Pascal

  Hands, Judging, Understanding

  10 Copy quote

• In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, Issues, Feelings

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• In fact, NSF was the leading successful efforts to improve U.S. math and science education long before the Department of Education was even created.

  Bob Inglis

  Successful, Long, Effort

  7 Copy quote

• In studying mathematics or simply using a mathematical principle, if we get the wrong answer in sort of algebraic equation, we do not suddenly feel that there is an anti-mathematical principle that is luring us into the wrong answers.

  Eric Butterworth

  Principles, Wrong Answers, Study

  9 Copy quote

• The physical five oranges goes up the ladder to the picture of the five oranges which goes up to the representation of the five oranges as a numeral. This points in the direction of a definition of abstraction: when we abstract we voluntarily ignore details of a context, so that we can accomplish a goal.

  Dan Meyer

  Education, Orange, Goal

  8 Copy quote