Mathematics Quotes
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I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission.
Carl Eckart
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The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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Chess is not Mathematics, where ten is always more than one; in chess the King with a pawn can beat opponent's King with all pieces if they are placed badly.
Ashot Nadanian
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Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, like Riemann before him. Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.
Michio Kaku
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In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic.
William Godwin
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It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.
Cassiodorus
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Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
Plato
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One thing that definitely did calculate properly for me was the mathematics that makes sense every day, no matter how I look at it, I can't get around it. I try to get around it, I keep trying to find one plus one is not two, somehow. I can't. People can talk about string theory, parallel realities, different dimensions, it's still one plus one is two, baby.
Robert Fitzgerald Diggs
Achozen
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I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.
Stephen Cole Kleene
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Mathematics is the language in which the gods talk to people.
Plato
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Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.
Benjamin Peirce
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It was the White Race who produced men like Columbus who crossed the unknown Atlantic; men like Magellan who first circumnavigated the globe; men like Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Raphael and thousands of other geniuses who created beautiful and exquisite productions in the fields of sculpture and painting; geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi who created beautiful music; men like James Watt who invented the steam engine; men like Daimler who invented and built the reciprocating internal combustion engine; production geniuses like Henry Ford, inventors like Thomas Edison; such a prodigal genius as Nikola Tesla in the field of physics and electricity; literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Goethe and thousands of others, untold geniuses in the fields of mathematics, in the fields of chemistry and physics.
Ben Klassen
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All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other, and all means of discovering them are equally admissible.
Adrien-Marie Legendre
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My special pleasure in mathematics rested particularly on its purely speculative part.
Bernard Bolzano
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The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.
Hippolyte Taine
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I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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Had been deeply struck.... by the damage wreaked upon mathematics in France by the first world war, when “a misguided notion of equality in the face of sacrifice” led to the slaughter of the country’s young scientific elite. In the light of this, he believed he had a duty, not just to himself but also to civilization, to devote his life to mathematics. Indeed, he argued, to let himself be diverted from the subject would be a sin. When others raised the objection “but if everybody were to behave like you...”, he replied that this possibility seemed to him so implausible that he did not feel obliged to take it into account.
Edward Frenkel
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Mathematics exists solely for the honour of the human mind.
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
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Many of the proofs in mathematics are very long and intricate. Others, though not long, are very ingeniously constructed.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
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As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.
William Thurston
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In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty years or so that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians agree: mathematics is the science of patterns.
Keith Devlin
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Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
Sofia Kovalevskaya
