Best 1208 quotes in «math quotes» category

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities. [Following the success of the confirmation of the existence of the planet Neptune, he considered the possibility of the discovery of a yet further planet.]

This world is of a single piece; yet, we invent nets to trap it for our inspection. Then we mistake our nets for the reality of the piece. In these nets we catch the fishes of the intellect but the sea of wholeness forever eludes our grasp. So, we forget our original intent and then mistake the nets for the sea. Three of these nets we have named Nature, Mathematics, and Art. We conclude they are different because we call them by different names. Thus, they are apt to remain forever separated with nothing bonding them together. It is not the nets that are at fault but rather our misunderstanding of their function as nets. They do catch the fishes but never the sea, and it is the sea that we ultimately desire.

... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.

To be a scholar study math, to be a smart study magic.

We’ll start with an easy one, shall we? What is the secant of three pi?” The troll asked. “Pie?” Toru felt suddenly hungry. “What are you talking about, man, have you gone senile? A sea camp? You mean like the floating city?

We mathematicians understand that without the education of children, the economy cannot grow, and the world would starve from ignorance.

We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us.

What if at school you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to pain a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso? Would that make you appreciate art? Would you want to learn more about it? I doubt it...Of course this sounds ridiculous, but this is how math is taught.

What I am trying to say is that more than your own life has to be at stake, before a person becomes desperate enough to resort to math.

When one day Lagrange took out of his pocket a paper which he read at the Académe, and which contained a demonstration of the famous Postulatum of Euclid, relative to the theory of parallels. This demonstration rested on an obvious paralogism, which appeared as such to everybody; and probably Lagrange also recognised it such during his lecture. For, when he had finished, he put the paper back in his pocket, and spoke no more of it. A moment of universal silence followed, and one passed immediately to other concerns.

Why do you have such a crappy attitude about math?" "I don't. I have a crappy attitude about everything.

with us you are not just a number. but if you really want to work here, you better know how to count

To a scholar, mathematics is music.

Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse.

What if Loves are analogous to math? First, arithmetic, then geometry and algebra, then trig and quadratics…

What I like?? I like how people solve the problems, the way they think aND THEIR aspects!

What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.

When a friend introduced me to a Bach chaconne, he started by describing it by saying that it has 256 measures (256=2^8) divided into 4 sections of 64 measures (64=2^6), and I liked it even before I heard a single note.

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.

you are a mirror if you continue to starve yourself of love you'll only meet people who'll starve you too if you soak yourself in love the universe will hand you those who'll love you too

You can fuck your math teacher but you can't fuck math.

Yes," I continued, "I discovered this model recently and her style never fails to be mathematically perfect. She seems to come by it naturally. As if she were born resonant. I notice Japanese models tend to do this. Like I said, they seem to have resonance somewhere deep in their culture. But Yuri Nakagawa, she's the best I've ever seen. The best model, with the most powerful resonance. I need her to probe deeper into this profound mathematical instinct, which I call resonance.

A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

After exponential quantities the circular functions, sine and cosine, should be considered because they arise when imaginary quantities are involved in the exponential.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.... The two propositions: "The earth turns round" and "it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round" have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the "default" states, and everything else involves some "perturbation." This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

A hit show takes Hollywood magic indeed, but it also takes a lot of math and science, plus the study of polls and trends to make and sell a TV show.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept,and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one.

A good student is one who will teach you something.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

All I wanted to do was put together one of the best home maths systems in the world, and that's what we've done. I've loved numbers since I was two or three, and I get really excited about them. Now, I'm allowing myself to get excited about things. If you're doing it for a TV network or any major corporation, you have to put a lid on it a little.

All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.

All of us are slaves to the prejudices of our own dimension.

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

All problems in mathematics are psychological.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.

All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade.