Best 5 quotes of Jordan Ellenberg on MyQuotes

My reading practice is one reason I mostly don't read electronically. Different books are in different rooms of my house, and one is in my backpack. Physical location tells me what book to read.

This is a collaboration between a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer. It sounds like a joke, a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer walk into a bar.

A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.

Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.

We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules.You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don't obey them you get a C-.This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study if things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.