Quotes About Mathematician

As the sensations of motion and discreteness led to the abstract notions of the calculus, so may sensory experience continue thus to suggest problem for the mathematician, and so may she in turn be free to reduce these to the basic formal logical relationships involved. Thus only may be fully appreciated the twofold aspect of mathematics: as the language of a descriptive interpretation of the relationships discovered in natural phenomena, and as a syllogistic elaboration of arbitrary premise.

The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal Dornick who, as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting …

You're coming to work for him, aren't you?" "Well yes, I'm a mathematician. Why does he predict disaster? What kind of disaster?" "What kind would you think?" "I'm afraid I wouldn't have the least idea. I've read the papers Dr. Seldon and his group have published. They're on mathematical theory." "Yes, the ones they publish." Gaal

I have a particular affection for zero because it was some of my countrymen who first gave it the status of a number.

I'm a mathematician. I can trade in facts about false positives and absolute truths about accuracy and statistics with complete confidence.

A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a "solution" and creates a problem.

First, fractal objects, as we have seen, can be generated with a simple rule applied to itself, which makes them ideal for the automatic activity of a computer (or Mother Nature). Second, in the generation of visual intuitions lies a dialectic between the mathematician and the objects generated.

Our existence here, he says, is a case of "not we the accidental but we the expected." Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.

Among the students, the Phantom was often held up as a cautionary figure: Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was "going to wind up like the Phantom."10 Yet if a new student complained that having him around made him feel uncomfortable, he was immediately warned: "He was a better mathematician than you'll ever be!

six degrees of the mathematician Paul Erdös, himself a pioneer of network theory, as we have seen.13 Recent research suggests the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technological change since the 1970s has perhaps been less transformative than is commonly supposed.14 For the directors of Fortune 1000 companies, however, it is 4.6.15 For Facebook users it was 3.74 in 2012,16 and just 3.57 in 2016.

Well, of course one must have concentration. Courage. Self-control. That goes without saying. But more important than these, one must have... I don't know how to say it. One must be both a mathematician and a poet. As though poetry were a science; or mathematics an art. One must have an affection for proportion to play Go at all well.Ah... what Go is to philosophers and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants.

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

THERE HE REMAINED for almost two years, cut off from every other scholar or mathematician. The isolation suited him. "In those days," he would recall half a century later, "I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics & Philosophy more than at any time since.

I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.

The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof; but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by guessing.

Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means....[A] machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant 'the man from Chorasmia' (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).

Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it.

Leonhard Euler

The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history. Since

A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.