Mathematics Quotes - Page 13

• Thus the good christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make false prophecies, however much they may in fact speak the truth; lest, being in league with the devil, they may deceive errant souls into making common cause.

  Saint Augustine

  Christian, League, Soul

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• Every field has its taboos. In algebraic geometry the taboos are (1) writing a draft that can be followed by anyone but two or three of one's closest friends, (2) claiming that a result has applications, (3) mentioning the word 'combinatorial,' and (4) claiming that algebraic geometry existed before Grothendieck (only some handwaving references to 'the Italians' are allowed provided they are not supported by specific references).

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Writing, Two, Three

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• Waste not thy time in windy argument but let the matter drop.

  William Shakespeare

  Matter, Waste, Argument

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• Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

  John Updike

  Beautiful, Moving, Math

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• A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display.

  Herbert Wilf

  Numbers, Clotheslines, Function

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• The Mathematics are Friends to Religion; inasmuch as they charm the Passions, restrain the Impetuosity of Imagination, and purge the Mind from Error and Prejudice.

  John Arbuthnot

  God, Faith, Hope

  "An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning: In a Letter from a Gentleman in the City, to His Friend at Oxford".

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• There is no smallest among the small and no largest among the large, but always something still smaller and something still larger.

  Anaxagoras

  Smallest, Stills

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• Although I was four years at the University [of Wisconsin], I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer.

  John Muir

  Latin, Science, Years

  John Muir (2006). “Essential Muir”, Heyday

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• What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

  Galileo Galilei

  Philosophy, Sky, Fields

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• In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson ... of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.

  Robert Musil

  Lying, Intellectual, Analogies

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.42, University of Chicago Press

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• Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or "mathematics envy."

  Marvin Minsky

  Believe, Simple, Thinking

  "Music, Mind, and Meaning". Computer Music Journal, Volume 5, Number 3, web.media.mit.edu. 1981.

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• Yeah, Silver and his math are jokes, because math has a liberal bias. After all, math is the reason Mitt Romney's tax plan doesn't add up.

  Stephen Colbert

  Math, Add, Silver

  "The Colbert Report". Comedy, News, Talk-Show, November 05, 2012.

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• Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir ... My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!

  Frederick The Great

  Vanity, Water, Yards

  Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great. Letter 221, 1927.

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• It is a well-known experience that the only truly enjoyable and profitable way of studying mathematics is the method of "filling in details" by one's own efforts.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Effort, Filling In, Way

  "Applied Analysis" by Cornelius Lanczos, Prentice-Hall, 1956.

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• Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

  John Banville

  Math, Null, Mixtures

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• I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error." The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement, amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason.

  Francis Galton

  Math, Errors, Self

  Natural Inheritance Normal Variability (p. 66)

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• We come finally, however, to the relation of the ideal theory to real world, or "real" probability. If he is consistent a man of the mathematical school washes his hands of applications. To someone who wants them he would say that the ideal system runs parallel to the usual theory: "If this is what you want, try it: it is not my business to justify application of the system; that can only be done by philosophizing; I am a mathematician". In practice he is apt to say: "try this; if it works that will justify it".

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Running, Real, School

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• A proof only becomes a proof after the social act of "accepting it as a proof".

  IU?. I. Manin

  Social, Accepting, Proof

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• What could be more general than 2, which can represent two galaxies or two pickles, or one galaxy plus one pickle (the mind doth boggle), or just 2 gently bobbing - where? It, like God, is an "I am" and many have thought that it must be a precipitate of ultimate reality.

  Alfred W. Crosby

  Reality, Numbers, Two

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• "I count a lot of things that there's no need to count," Cameron said. "Just because that's the way I am. But I count all the things that need to be counted."

  Richard Brautigan

  Numbers, Needs, Way

  Richard Brautigan (2017). “The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western”, p.111, Canongate Books

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• Them as counts counts moren them as dont count

  Russell Hoban

  Numbers

  Russell Hoban (2012). “Riddley Walker”, p.19, A&C Black

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• The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Men, Two, Chess Pieces

  Jorge Luis Borges (2001). “The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• And so matching by itself is incapable of creating an art of reckoning. Without our ability to arrange things in ordered succession little progress could have been made. Correspondence and succession, the two principles that permeate all mathematics - nay, all realms of exact thought - are woven into the very fabric of our number system.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Art, Numbers, Two

  Tobias Dantzig (1954). “Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician”

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• In the history of the concept of number has been adjective (three cows, three monads) and noun (three, pure and simple), and now ... number seems to be more like a verb (to triple).

  Barry Mazur

  Simple, Numbers, Three

  Barry Mazur (2004). “Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)”, p.138, Macmillan

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• The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.

  Lee Smolin

  Notebook, Real, Numbers

  Lee Smolin (2008). “Three Roads To Quantum Gravity”, p.106, Hachette UK

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