Quotes About Abstraction

how we tend to generalize from what we see.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking. We will see that probability is a qualitative subject.

I am simplifying numbers here for clarity.

A correspondent, Jean-Louis Rheault, wrote, "I have noticed that the more people glorify the entrepreneur as an abstraction, the more they will scorn an actual one they meet.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking.

Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity.

modernity likes the abstract over the particular;

So we simplify. We perform calculations that reduce a complex array of data into a handful of numbers that describe those data

6. Round down.

The symbol is not a mere formality; it is the very essence of algebra. Without the symbol the object is a human perception and reflects all the phases under which the human senses grasp it; replaced by a symbol the object becomes a complete abstraction, a mere operand subject to certain indicated operations.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.

The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction," Dobzhansky wrote. "It is a subterfuge to cloak one's ignorance.

he stressed that the main feature of science is economy of thought;

Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.

We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that one cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form.

We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

Parecía fuera de lugar, como un pájaro, una de esas aves que no vuelan; o como un científico abstraído que ha salido por error de su laboratorio. También tenía un aire de sordidez, un aire de fracaso.

There was no such thing as a straight line until mathematicians invented one.

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant.

One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

In a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.