Mathematical Quotes - Page 20

• Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

  Bertrand Russell

  Math, Men, Wife

  Impact of Science on Society ch. 1 (1952)

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• Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

  Rene Descartes

  Math, Men, Numbers

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• The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  Truth, Curiosity, Precious Possessions

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• It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

  Aristotle

  Workout, Live Life, Philosophical

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• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Funny, Wisdom

  Address to Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 27 Jan. 1921

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• Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

  Albert Einstein

  Teaching, Math, Science

  "Obituary for Emmy Noether". Letter to the Editor of The New York Times, www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. May 5, 1935.

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• If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

  John von Neumann

  Believe, Math, Simple

  John von Neumann's remarks as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery (1947) as quoted in "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945-1947" by Franz L. Alt, Communications of the ACM, Volume 15, Issue 7, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery (p. 694), July 1972.

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• Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

  Bertrand Russell

  Humility, Math, Science

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “An Outline of Philosophy”, p.171, Routledge

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• I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations.

  G. H. Hardy

  Lying, Believe, Science

  G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.123, Cambridge University Press

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• The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.

  Euclid

  God, Nature, Math

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• Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

  Blaise Pascal

  Inspirational, Men, Vision

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Time, Writing, Math

  "Calculus Gems". Book by George F. Simmons, 1992.

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• But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.

  Bertrand Russell

  Fall, Years, Elephants

  Bertrand Russell (1998). “Autobiography”, p.725, Psychology Press

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• Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

  Kenneth Arrow

  College, Statistics, Study

  Source: www.minneapolisfed.org

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• With respect to why some acquired savants are musical, and some are good at the arts, and some are mathematical, why aren't they all the same; I think that has to do with this genetic endowment that all of us have.

  Darold Treffert

  Art, Thinking, Musical

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.

  Jaron Lanier

  War, Views, Together

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I would also like to see children aged between 11 and 18 taught financial education in a structured way in schools. I would also say that that is not enough. You have also got to improve numeracy skills, mathematical skills in schools.

  George Osborne

  Children, School, Skills

  Source: blog.moneysavingexpert.com

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• For years I thought I was just a writer, but when I sat down to design and started playing around with it, I realized that, really, it's pretty easy. Obviously it's more than just a set of rules, but the basics of design are actually pretty simple and quite mathematical. The link between data and design works at quite a fundamental level.

  David Mccandless

  Simple, Design, Easy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that if your tenure case depends on your proving what you thought was a mathematical theorem and the proposed theorem turns out to be false just before your tenure decision, and you want to get tenure very badly, there is a sense in which it's perfectly understandable and reasonable of you to wish the proposed theorem were true and provable, even if it's logically impossible for it to be.

  Nomy Arpaly

  Thinking, Decision, Wish

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Poetry, song, stories, art, our reverence for nature, are key to our survival as a species, and to the survival of all species, I believe. You can't always extract such emphatic hunches and activist stances from a scientific maxim or mathematical axiom.

  Michael Tobias

  Song, Art, Believe

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• If there was some sort of mathematical equation for beauty, I don't know if I would be the algorithm. I've always been OK with that. I'm not a supermodel. That's not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what's happening on the outside.

  Lady Gaga

  Important, Supermodel

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Real, Creativity

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• If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?

  Martin Gardner

  Law, Dancing, Religion

  Martin Gardner (2005). “The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings”, p.136, Courier Corporation

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• No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

  G. H. Hardy

  Art, Science, Past

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• This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Witty, Humorous, Insult

  "The Successful Toastmaster: A Treasure Chest of Introductions, Epigrams, Humor, and Quotations" by Herbert Victor Prochnow, (p. 350), 1966.

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