Mathematics Quotes
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It seems to me there's this grand mathematical world out there, and I am wandering through it and discovering fascinating phenomena that often totally suprise me. I do not think of mathemaatics as invented but rather discovered.
George Andrews
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Though determinants and matrices received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century and thousands of papers were written on these subjects, they do not constitute great innovations in mathematics.... Neither determinants nor matrices have influenced deeply the course of mathematics despite their utility as compact expressions and despite the suggestiveness of matrices as concrete groups for the discernment of general theorems of group theory.
Morris Kline
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Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary and inevitable, but it is impossible to foresee their consequences. These have only been found out by long study, extending over many centuries. Much of our knowledge is due to a comparatively few great mathematicians such as Newton, Euler, Gauss, or Riemann; few careers can have been more satisfying than theirs. They have contributed something to human thought even more lasting than great literature, since it is independent of language.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
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Who would not rather have the fame of Archimedes than that of his conqueror Marcellus?
William Rowan Hamilton
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Mathematics is not a spectator sport!
George Polya
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The indispensability argument says (roughly) that if you have ample reason to accept an empirical scientific theory that makes indispensable use of mathematics, and that theory entails that numbers exist, then you have ample reason to accept that numbers exist. The argument affirms the antecedent of this conditional, and concludes that you have ample reason to believe that numbers exist. What is striking about this argument is that it seems to show that the empirical reasons that suffice for accepting a scientific theory also suffice for accepting a metaphysical claim.
Elliott Sober
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I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.
Mickey Hart
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Logic has virtually nothing to do with the way we think.
David Mumford
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The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.
Tony Abbott
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Beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort.
George Polya
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Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.
William Thurston
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While, on the one hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. These ultimate laws-in the domain of physical science at least-will be the dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ultimate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathematics.
William Mitchinson Hicks
