Mathematical Quotes - Page 23

• The Christian's God does not merely consist of a God who is the Author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and consolation.

  Blaise Pascal

  Christian, Order, Doe

  "The Mind on Fire: Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent".

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• A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

  Manfred Eigen

  Math, Science, Technology

  The Physicist's Conception of Nature edited by Jagdish Mehra (p. 618)

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• There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. These definitions rest upon simple, but abstract, suppositions, and all truths in this category are only constructed, but abstract, consequences of these definitions ... Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Truth, Simple, Order

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• A lack of seriousness has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Creativity, Ideas, Imagination

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• Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

  J. K. Rowling

  Creativity, Sweat, Ideas

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• Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.

  Carl Benjamin Boyer

  Math, Science, Culture

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• But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.

  Marston Morse

  Art, Math, Science

  Marston Morse, Raoul Bott (1981). “Selected papers”, Springer Verlag

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• We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

  Mark Twain

  Math, Science, Eight

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.8549, Delphi Classics

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• The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.

  John G. Kemeny

  Math, Science, Men

  John G. Kemeny (1964). “Random Essays on Mathematics, Education, and Computers”

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• That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?

  Shmuel Weinberger

  Math, Science, Practice

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• The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Math, Science, Able

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2015). “Sherlock Holmes: The Novels: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.93, Penguin

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• ...learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for some time; but when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, being rather diverted than overcome by such speculations.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Science, Overcoming, Amusement

  Gilbert Burnet (1745). “An Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England”, p.176

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• During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical. The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow from it, if it be true

  Augustus De Morgan

  Knowledge, Science, Two

  Augustus De Morgan (1872). “A Budget of Paradoxes Reprinted, with the Author's Additions, from the Athenaeum Augustus De Morgan”, p.2

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• We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.

  E. H. Moore

  Math, Science, Analogies

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• Characteristically skeptical of the idea that living things would faithfully follow mathematical formulas, [Robert Harper] seized upon factors in corn which seemed to blend in the hybrid-rather than be represented by plus or minus signs, and put several seasons into throwing doubt upon the concept of immutable hypothetical units of inheritance concocted to account for selected results.

  Charles Thom

  Life, Science, Ideas

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• In my opinion a mathematician, in so far as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy-an opinion, moreover, which has been expressed by many philosophers.

  Henri Lebesgue

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Math

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• Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton

  Wise, Attention, Pay

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1875). “The Intellectual Life”, p.142

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• To be a scholar of mathematics you must be born with talent, insight, concentration, taste, luck, drive and the ability to visualize and guess.

  Paul Halmos

  Math, Luck, Taste

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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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• Life is the twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition at once general and continuous.

  Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville

  Life, Science, Movement

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• In fact, Gentlemen, no geometry without arithmetic, no mechanics without geometry... you cannot count upon success, if your mind is not sufficiently exercised on the forms and demonstrations of geometry, on the theories and calculations of arithmetic ... In a word, the theory of proportions is for industrial teaching, what algebra is for the most elevated mathematical teaching.

  Jean-Victor Poncelet

  Success, Teaching, Science

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• It is easy to make out three areas where scientists will be concentrating their efforts in the coming decades. One is in physics, where leading theorists are striving, with the help of experimentalists, to devise a single mathematical theory that embraces all the basic phenomena of matter and energy. The other two are in biology. Biologists-and the rest of us too-would like to know how the brain works and how a single cell, the fertilized egg cell, develops into an entire organism

  Dennis Flanagan

  Science, Cells, Eggs

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• [The infinitely small] neither have nor can have theory; it is a dangerous instrument in the hands of beginners [ ... ] anticipating, for my part, the judgement of posterity, I would dare predict that this method will be accused one day, and rightly, of having retarded the progress of the mathematical sciences.

  Francois-Joseph Servois

  Science, Hands, Judgement

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• The great problem of today is, how to subject all physical phenomena to dynamical laws. With all the experimental devices, and all the mathematical appliances of this generation, the human mind has been baffled in its attempts to construct a universal science of physics.

  Joseph Lovering

  Science, Law, Mind

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• The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

  Hippolyte Taine

  Art, Science, History

  Hippolyte Taine (1908). “Life and Letters of H. Taine: 1870-1892”

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