Quotes About Calculus

I hated as hard as I could. I thought about Nazis. Air pollution. The Twilight books. Bill O'Reilly (beginner's mistake; political hate is notoriously hard to channel). Calculus.

He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus.

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.

Newton's law of gravitation. That's all you need (with a spot of calculus to crunch the numbers) to work out how the Earth will orbit the Sun or how an apple will fall if you let it go at a certain height. The only trouble is that Newton had no idea how this gravity thing worked. His model was simply: 'There is an attraction between bits of stuff, and let's not bother about why.

Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)

The calculus is simple: Trump wants more freedom; Lockdown Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., want less.

For reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. Maybe God made it that way. Or maybe it's the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can't harbor life intelligent enough to ask the question. In any case, it's a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations.

The insights provided by the model overturned the prevailing view that the virus was lying dormant in the body; in fact, it was in a raging battle with the immune system every minute of every day. With the new understanding that calculus helped provide, HIV infection has been transformed from a near-certain death sentence to a manageable chronic disease—at least for those with access to combination-drug therapy.

Creation is intuitive; reason comes later. In the story of calculus, more than in other parts of mathematics, logic has always lagged behind intuition. This makes the subject feel especially human and approachable, and its geniuses more like the rest of us.

No matter how erratically something moves, the area accumulated under its speed curve up to time t always equals the total distance it has traveled up to that time.

Thus, calculus proceeds in two phases: cutting and rebuilding. In mathematical terms, the cutting process always involves infinitely fine subtraction, which is used to quantify the differences between the parts. Accordingly, this half of the subject is called differential calculus. The reassembly process always involves infinite addition, which integrates the parts back into the original whole. This half of the subject is called integral calculus.

In a cruel irony, both Newton and Leibniz, the pioneers of calculus, died in excruciating pain while suffering from calculi—a bladder stone for Newton, a kidney stone for Leibniz.

Anything that's continuous can be sliced exactly (not just approximately) into infinitely many infinitesimal pieces.

Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn't. "You had better learn it," said Feynman. "It's the language God talks.

a cruel irony, both Newton and Leibniz, the pioneers of calculus, died in excruciating pain while suffering from calculi—a bladder stone for Newton, a kidney stone for Leibniz.

All of calculus, and hence all of theoretical physics, hinges on this assumption of continuous space and time. That assumption of continuity has been resoundingly successful so far.

Calculus, like other forms of mathematics, is much more than a language; it's also an incredibly powerful system of reasoning.

In a nutshell, calculus wants to make hard problems simpler.

Yet somehow, if the translation from reality into symbols is done artfully enough, the logic of calculus can use one real-world truth to generate another. Truth in, truth out.

With the star up above and the blackness of space, I can't avoid feeling awe. How could we, Homo sapiens, an insignificant species on an insignificant planet adrift in a middleweight galaxy, have managed to predict how space and time would tremble after two black holes collided in the vastness of the universe a billion light-years away? We knew what that wave should sound like before it got here. And, courtesy of calculus, computers, and Einstein, we were right.

In a nutshell, calculus wants to make hard problems simpler. It is utterly obsessed with simplicity.

Pi is fundamentally a child of calculus. It is defined as the unattainable limit of a never-ending process.

So he used calculus not only to predict the existence of electromagnetic waves but also to solve an age-old mystery: What was the nature of light? Light, he realized, was an electromagnetic wave.

Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread of epidemics to the zigs and zags of a well-thrown curveball. The subject is gargantuan—and so are its textbooks. Many exceed a thousand pages and work nicely as doorstops.