Mathematician Quotes - Page 25

• It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Fall, Numbers, Definitions

  "Economics As a Science" by Kenneth E. Boulding, McGraw-Hill, (p. 97), 1988.

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• So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Ignorance, Responsibility, Reality

  "Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure". Book by R. Buckminster Fuller, p. 234, "The Designers and the Politicians" (1962), 1969.

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• Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination.

  Leonard Koppett

  Imagination, Pace, Cliche

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• Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Years, Long, Males

  "Numbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea Persists". www.nytimes.com. October 3, 2006.

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• Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Law, Giving, Dollars

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• Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

  Molly Antopol

  Writing, Empathy, Style

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• I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Interesting, Today, Not Interested

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.232, Princeton University Press

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• James Edward Oliver might have been one of the great mathematicians of his time had he not been absolutely wanting in the power of continuous work.

  Simon Newcomb

  Might, Might Have Been, Has Beens

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  People, Cheerful, Matter

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• I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

  John Hurt

  School, Thinking, Talking

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, film.avclub.com. March 22, 2007.

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• To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.

  Ian Stewart

  Technology, Ideas, Simplicity

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• Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

  Freeman Dyson

  Science, Imagination, Nomenclature

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• Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

  G. H. Hardy

  Real, Science, Understanding

  G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.81, Cambridge University Press

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• A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

  G. H. Hardy

  Math, Patterns, Original Ideas

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.84, Cambridge University Press

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• Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Art, Math, Emotional

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• Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means. The geometer might be replaced by the "logic piano" imagined by Stanley Jevons; or, if you choose, a machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

  Henri Poincare

  Mean, Math, Piano

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• It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Thinking, Law

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• We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts.

  Malcolm X

  Country, Jobs, Children

  Malcolm X (1992). “By any means necessary”, Pathfinder Pr

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• I have written a book called 'In the Wonderland of Numbers.' It's about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician.

  Shakuntala Devi

  Girl, Book, Numbers

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• ... the atlas is a manifold. This is a typical mathematician's use of the word "is", and should not be confused with the normal use.

  Timothy Gowers

  Confused, Science, Typical

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• So in the end it wasn't Gödel, it wasn't Turing, and it wasn't my results that are making mathematics go into an experimental mathematics direction, in a quasi-empirical direction. The reason why mathematicians are changing their working habits is the computer. I think that this is an excellent joke!

  Gregory Chaitin

  Science, Thinking, Reason Why

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• Mathematicians tend to prefer a worst-case analysis, a kind of paranoia that is especially understandable if you live in Israel!

  Noga Alon

  Science, Israel, Analysis

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• Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Mean, Looks, Movement

  William Caxton, Jean Calvin, Nicolaus Copernicus, John Knox, Edmund Spenser (1938). “Prefaces and prologues to famous books”

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• This Excellent Mathematician having given us, in the Transactions of February last, an account of the cause, which induced him to think upon Reflecting Telescopes, instead of Refracting ones, hath thereupon presented the curious world with an Essay of what may be performed by such Telescopes; by which it is found, that Telescopical Tubes may be considerably shortened without prejudice to their magnifiying effect. On his invention of the catadioptrical telescope, as he communicated to the Royal Society.

  Isaac Newton

  Science, Thinking, World

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• Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by
  themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for
  ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Order, Class, Ordinary

  Eric Temple Bell (1945). “Men of Mathematics”

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