Mathematics Quotes
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Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.
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I was brought up on rock-'n'-roll. It was sort of funny because I couldn't get interested in anything else - I tried and tried but I couldn't get into science...or mathematics, I just cut myself off from anything else there was to get interested in.
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I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'
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It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
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But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.
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This is a wonderful book, unique and engaging. Diaconis and Graham manage to convey the awe and marvels of mathematics, and of magic tricks, especially those that depend fundamentally on mathematical ideas. They range over many delicious topics, giving us an enchanting personal view of the history and practice of magic, of mathematics, and of the fascinating connection between the two cultures. Magical Mathematics will have an utterly devoted readership.
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I am severely dyslexic, so I'm not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don't excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.
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Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
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The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.
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Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
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But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.
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Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
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At the risk of being forgotten completely by the media, I went to college and pursued a passion that had nothing to do with acting: mathematics.
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The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
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When Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most devine and sacred gift.
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The investigation of mathematical truths accustoms the mind to method and correctness in reasoning, and is an employment peculiarly worthy of rational beings.
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The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.
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If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
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You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics.
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If there is one thing in mathematics that fascinates me more than anything else (and doubtless always has), it is neither "number" nor "size", but always form. And among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.
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The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.
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If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
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In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
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Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room.
