Mathematical Quotes - Page 30

• Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

  James Dyson

  Technology, Ideas, Design

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• The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

  Morris Kline

  Science, Reality, Order

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.382, Oxford University Press

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• [1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another.

  Isaac Newton

  Science, Space, Air

  Sir Isaac Newton (1959). “Correspondence: 1676-1687”

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• Scientology is not written with disrespect toward God. It doesn't worship something that is evil. It is scientific, mathematical, and spiritual. The black community has to check it out and see what's there. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but you have to take a look.

  Doug E. Fresh

  Spiritual, Evil, Community

  "Scientology appealing to African-Americans" by Matthew Hay Brown, www.baltimoresun.com. September 7, 2009.

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• Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

  Edmund Husserl

  Ideas, Research, Insight

  Edmund Husserl, Peter McCormick, Frederick Elliston (1981). “Husserl, shorter works”, Univ of Notre Dame Pr

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• I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

  Hari Kunzru

  Simple, Ideas, Patterns

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• I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say, 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

  Chad Kroeger

  Artist, Cobain, Strange

  "Our Hate Has Saved Nickelback" by Ian Crouch, www.newyorker.com. November 20, 2014.

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• From Roger Bacon, the 13th century Franciscan who pioneered the scientific method, to George Lemaitre, the 20th century Belgian priest who first developed a mathematical foundation for the 'Big Bang,' people of faith have played a key role in advancing scientific understanding.

  Kenneth R. Miller

  Keys, People, Understanding

  "Science And Religion: Incompatible?" by Science And Religion: Incompatible?, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 7, 2012.

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• Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s.

  Stephen Cole Kleene

  Mathematical Logic, Wisconsin, Undergraduate

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• The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.

  Georg Cantor

  Independent, Order, Numbers

  "Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1987.

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• The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.

  D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

  Education, Philosophy, Heart

  D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1992). “On Growth and Form”, p.326, Cambridge University Press

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• The space that we're looking through is nine-dimensional. If you build a mathematical model, the amount of searching that we've done in 50 years is equivalent to scooping one 8-ounce glass out of the Earth's ocean, looking and seeing if you caught a fish. No, no fish in that glass? Well, I don't think you're going to conclude that there are no fish in the ocean. You just haven't searched very well yet. That's where we are.

  Jill Tarter

  Ocean, Thinking, Years

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• Il y a deux sortes d'esprits, l'un ge  ome  trique, et l'autre que l'on peut appeler de finesse. Le premier a des vues lentes, dures et inflexibles; mais le dernier a une souplesse de pense  e. There are two kinds of mind, one mathematical, the other what one might call the intuitive. The first takes a slow, firm, inflexible view, but the latter has flexibility of thought.

  Blaise Pascal

  Views, Two, Mind

  c.1653 Discours sur les passions de l'amour (Discourse on the Passions of Love).This is usually attributed to Pascal.

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• The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.

  Alan Greenspan

  Years, Important, Genius

  1995 In the NewYork Times, 6 Mar, shortly after the collapse of Barings in Singapore brought about by a young derivatives trader.

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• Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Life, Lying, Waiting

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter VI : The Paradoxes of Christianity, 1908.

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• Justice to others and to ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses

  Albert Pike

  Squares, Circles, Justice

  Albert Pike (2013). “Morals and Dogma”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• Mathematical studies may serve for a pleasant entertainment for those hours which young men are apt to throw away upon their vices.

  John Arbuthnot

  Men, Vices, May

  George Atherton Aitken, John Arbuthnot (1892). “The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, M.D.: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians”

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• Here is a quilted book about mathematical practice, each patch wonderfully prepared. Part invitation to number theory, part autobiography, part sociology of mathematical training, Mathematics without Apologies brings us into contemporary mathematics as a living, active inquiry by real people. Anyone wanting a varied, cultured, and penetrating view of today's mathematics could find no better place to engage.

  Peter Galison

  Real, Book, Apology

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• Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

  Alan Turing

  Exercise, Two, Drawing

  "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, Volume 45, 1939.

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• Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Zero, Men, Political

  Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.12, University of Chicago Press

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• This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.

  Steven G. Krantz

  Pain, Hate, Book

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• Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical.Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind.

  Michael Crichton

  Children, Firsts, Chemistry

  1969 The Andromeda Strain.

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• The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry ; a science for which this race created a new era.(...) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Powerful, Race, Intellectual

  "Cosmos". Book by H.G. Bohn, v2, p. 589,595, 1860.

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• Vacuum stands and remains a mathematical space. A cube placed in a vacuum would not displace anything, as it would displace air or water in a space already containing those fluids.

  Roger Bacon

  Air, Space, Water

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• If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.

  John von Neumann

  Might, Transformation, Contrast

  John Von Neumann, F. Br¢dy, Tibor V mos (1995). “The Neumann Compendium”, p.632, World Scientific

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