Quotes About Deduction

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.

If there's a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there's a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

Cauchy was not interested in the needs of engineers. Cauchy was interested in the truth.

To do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason.

Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument.

when you're working hard on a theorem you should try to prove it by day and disprove it by night.

I dove on those papers like Sherlock Holmes on a cappuccino binge.

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.

The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

A tax is something people pay out of income.

If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.

If I put 3,000 miles a year on my car, that's a lot. If I buy them, it just doesn't make sense, so I lease them, and my company writes the whole car expense off.

I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four.

I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.

With a keen eye for details, one truth prevails!

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Elementary My dear Watson

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Okay. How about detectives? What about Sherlock Holmes?" Stevie rolled her eyes. "What's wrong with Sherlock Holmes?" Janelle asked. "Nothing is wrong with Sherlock Holmes," Stevie said. "But he's not a costume. He's . .

On a whiteboard, a detective had written Tips called in: 452. Tips cleared: GET TO WORK.

to justify any such inference.