Quotes from Ian Stewart

Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

During the past fifty years, more mathematics has been created than in all previous ages put together.

On the other hand, these events show real science in action, warts and all. If no one is allowed to get things wrong, no progress will ever be made. It also illustrates scientists' willingness to change their minds when new evidence comes along or old evidence is shown to be misleading.

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.

Unless you are genuinely interested in working with someone, don't. It doesn't matter how big an expert they are, or how much grant money the project would bring in. Stay away from things that do not interest you.

IQ is a statistical method for quantifying specific kinds of problem-solving ability, mathematically convenient but not necessarily corresponding to a real attribute of the human brain, and not necessarily representing whatever it is that we mean by 'intelligence'.

In mathematics, it's unwise to abandon an interesting idea just because it's wrong.

Maxwell's equations didn't just change the world. They opened up a new one.

Haosul nu este întâmpl?tor: el este o comportare aparent întâmpl?toare, rezultând din reguli foarte precise. Haosul este o form? criptic? de ordine.

Something that doesn't actually exist can still be useful.

Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.

Lucrul cel mai simplu pe care îl ai de f?cut atunci când trebuie s? te miÅŸti, dar nu poÅ£i evada, este s? oscilezi.

Math is a product of human minds but not bendable to human will

if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is.     Good

The urban myth that carrots are good for your eyesight originated in wartime disinformation, intended to stop the Nazis wondering why the British were getting so good at spotting raiding bombers.

The Black–Scholes equation changed the world by creating a booming quadrillion-dollar industry; its generalisations, used unintelligently by a small coterie of bankers, changed the world again by contributing to a multitrillion-dollar financial crash whose ever more malign effects, now extending to entire national economics, are still being felt worldwide.

En realidad, una de las grandes fortalezas de la ciencia es la habilidad para inferir cosas que no podemos observar directamente a partir de las que sí podemos.

Why resort to welfare cuts when you could aim more accurately at what you claim to be the real problem: intelligence itself? Why not improve education? Indeed, why aim your policy at increasing intelligence at all? There are many other desirable human traits. Why not reduce gullibility, aggressiveness, or greed?

Most information doesn't constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that's a very different concept from information.

El universo es infinitamente rico y complejo y suceden en él todo tipo de cosas maravillosas. Pero no deberíamos confundir los resultados con las causas e imaginar que el propósito del universo es hacer seres humanos.

Even today, women are generally under-represented in mathematics and science, but it's no longer socially acceptable to attribute this to differences in ability or mentality, as several prominent men have discovered to their dismay. Nor is there a shred of evidence to support those views.