Quotes About Mathematician

The Romans' contribution to science was mostly limited to butchering antiquity's greatest mathematician, burning the Library of Alexandria, and slowly stifling the sciences that flourished in the colonies of their Empire.

So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.

What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.

If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.

It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician.

Mathematics is to the scientist and the engineer a tool, to the professional mathematician a religion, but to the ordinary person a stumbling-block.

Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.

She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every façade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one's life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security--Ai-ming's love, the love of an older sister--out of my childhood and into my adult life.

Babbage was a brilliant mathematician but found human beings difficult to deal with. His intolerance of street musicians led to an organized campaign against him: his London home in Portland Place was bombarded by noise at all hours and abusive signs were hung in local shops.

I brought a young MIT mathematician, Dr. Nadipuram Prasad, into my department and gave him a budget. Within six months he developed the Markov method for econometric modeling. [...] It was exactly what we wanted: a tool that scientifically "proved" we were doing countries a favor by helping them incur debts they would never be able to pay off.

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.

Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

Slim and neatly groomed, he looked like a really sexy mathematician unaware that he was a prime number. I wanted to unbutton his shirt, muss his hair, and exclaim, "Good heavens, Professor Dracula, you're stunning!

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

The word "fractal" was coined in 1975 by the Polish/French/American mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot (b. 1924), to describe shapes which are detailed at all scales.

As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.

When he said someone had 'died", Erd?s meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.

The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.