Mathematics Quotes
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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.
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Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.
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The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. ... In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new.
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We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it.
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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.
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Mathematics exists solely for the honour of the human mind.
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Mathematics is the language in which the gods talk to people.
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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.
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Religion has the same relation to man's heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location.
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Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.
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Mathematics is concerned with "all possible worlds."
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Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.
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There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
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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.
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Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
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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.
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Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.
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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.
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The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.
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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.
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Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw.
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Let no one ignorant of Mathematics enter here.
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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.
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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.
