Quotes About Equations

She was his comet, his shooting star. She sparkled like the heavens, and when she smiled it felt like mathematical equations sliding into place. The world in balance, each side properly weighted. She was everything that was beauty, and everything that was brilliant, and he was – He was not well.

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Taleb argued that the limitations of the human brain resulted in our species' tendency to squeeze unrelated facts and events into cause-and-effect equations and then convert them into easily understandable narratives.

It's probably the wrong way round, I know, but I just love maths and doing equations. When I was a kid, I was really good at it, so when I was seven, I asked my mum what job lets you do maths and pays you for it. She said accountancy, and that was it. I was dead set.

Symmetry does mean something different for physicists than for members of the public. It means that an object or a theory does not change when you make some transformation - either rotating or moving it or doing something to the equations.

I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team's evolution.

Algebra ist gut für die Entwicklung. Ungefähr wie Demut, nur mit mehr Faktoren.

All things are math. Art especially is math.

Equations are the devil's sentences.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Von Neumann was in many ways a traditional mathematician, who (like Turing) believed he needed to turn to partial differential equations in describing natural systems.

Commenting on the importance of Maxwell's equations, Einstein wrote that they are the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.

Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe its properties.

If we now take a Kaluza-Klein theory defined in 4+N dimensions and then curl up N dimensions, we will find that the equations split into two pieces. The first piece is Einstein's usual equations, which we retrieve as expected. But the second piece will not be the theory of Maxwell. We find that the remainder is precisely the Yang-Mills theory, which forms the basis of all subatomic physics! This is the key to turning the symmetries of wood into the symmetries of marble.

Aquí, estamos reorganizando las partículas de nuestras ecuaciones de manera que los fermiones se intercambian por bosones, y viceversa. Esto se convierte en el punto central de la teoría de cuerdas, así que todas las partículas del universo se pueden sustituir unas por otras.

Stephen Hawking has proven a general theorem stating that all solutions of Einstein's equations that allow faster-than-light travel must involve negative matter or energy.

But Einstein refused to be mathematics' pawn. He bucked the equations in favor of his intuition about how the cosmos should be, his deep-seated belief that the universe was eternal and, on the largest of scales, fixed and unchanging. The universe, Einstein admonished Lemaître, is not now expanding and never was.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

The point being that everything emerges from the same collection of ingredients governed by the same physical principles. And those principles, as attested to by a few hundred years of observation, experimentation, and theorizing, will likely be expressed by a handful of symbols arranged in a small collection of mathematical equations. That is an elegant universe.