Mathematical Proof Quotes - Page 2

• It is my experience that proofs involving matrices can be shortened by 50% if one throws the matrices out.

  Emil Artin

  Mathematics, Proof, Mathematical

  Emil Artin (2016). “Geometric Algebra”, p.14, Courier Dover Publications

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• I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said..."

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Friendship, Math, Wish

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

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• When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

  Lord Kelvin

  Math, Science, Numbers

  Popular Lectures and Addresses "Electrical Units of Measurement" (1889).

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• No human investigation can claim to be scientific if it doesn't pass the test of mathematical proof.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Ontology, Tests, Logic

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• In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof."

  Eyvind Kang

  Art, Wall, Expression

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Poverty is a mathematical proof of the fact that mankind is a big failure!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Poverty, Facts, Proof

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• Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning.

  John Locke

  Math, Proof, Diamond

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• I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

  Paul Auster

  Science, Discovery, Weight

  Paul Auster (2014). “Collected Novels”, p.139, Faber & Faber

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• What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.

  Timothy Gowers

  Independent, Principles, Doe

  Timothy Gowers (2010). “Mathematics”, p.50, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Writing, Math

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• There was, I think, a feeling that the best science was that done in the simplest way. In experimental work, as in mathematics, there was "style" and a result obtained with simple equipment was more elegant than one obtained with complicated apparatus, just as a mathematical proof derived neatly was better than one involving laborious calculations. Rutherford's first disintegration experiment, and Chadwick's discovery of the neutron had a "style" that is different from that of experiments made with giant accelerators.

  J. A. Ratcliffe

  Science, Thinking, Simple

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