Quotes About Mathematicians

If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that "mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four." With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, some mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than rapture ready.com could ever do.

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very, very long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones.

Pueden los instintos adquirirse y modificarse por medio de la selección natural? ¿Qué diremos del instinto que lleva a la abeja a hacer celdas, y que prácticamente se ha adelantado a los descubrimientos de notables matemáticos?

Most of all, a good maths education encourages students to embrace difficult problems, not shy away from them. In my opinion, the problem is that most UK secondary schools don't stretch good mathematicians and therefore fail to turn them into excellent mathematicians.

How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?" None, was his answer. "Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married. . . . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal

The proof of Euclidean geometry's consistency eluded mathematicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best that was achieved was a proof that Euclidean geometry was consistent as long as arithmetic was consistent.

in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them—that's what computers are for.

Space programs are) a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology.

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable.

Mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

Courage is not a quality one normally associates with mathematicians. Yet it should apply to people who work in their attics in secret for seven years without cease on a problem that has eluded the greatest mathematical minds since first proposed in 1637.

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They'll tell you they don't need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they're like little children.

As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

For Israel to retain its amazing position as the largest concentration of high tech after Silicon Valley, we need more engineers and mathematicians. We have too many lawyers.

How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.