Quotes About Geometry

As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.") For

Como escribió Montesquieu: «Si los triángulos tuvieran un dios, le darían tres lados».)

The goal of drawing a smooth border through the fractal of interpenetrating ethnic groups is an unsolvable geometry problem, and living with existing borders is now considered better than endless attempts to square the circle, with its invitations to ethnic cleansing and irredentist conquest.

The geometry of beauty is the visible signal of adaptively valuable objects: safe, food-rich, explorable, learnable habitats, and fertile, healthy dates, mates, and babies.

That's the dirty little secret of advanced geometry. It may sound impressive that we can do geometry in ten dimensions (or a hundred, or a million...), but the mental pictures we keep in our mind are two-or at most three-dimensional. That's all our brains can handle. Fortunately, this impoverished vision is usually enough.

not every curve is a line.

If you have before you a square whose side has length X, its area is X times X—indeed, that's why we call the operation of multiplying a number by itself squaring!

The geometry of the things around us creates coincidences, intersections.

[To Ptolemy I:] There is no royal road to geometry.

Q.E.D. [Quod erat demonstrandum: Which was to be proved.]

A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.

[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.

Not that the propositions of geometry are only approximately true, but that they remain absolutely true in regard to that Euclidean space which has been so long regarded as being the physical space of our experience.

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself.

I think I still like science and art better, but geometry is a big improvement over algebra.

The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.

Il n'avait pas un doute sur l'éventualité prochaine de cette conception, et tout ce qu'il jugeait lui être hostile, Sénécal s'acharnait dessus, avec des raisonnements de géomètre et une bonne foi d'inquisiteur

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn".

Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vast distance through some intervening haze—although on the other hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.

He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.

I just toured around looking for fractals, and when I found something that had a scaling geometry, I would ask the folks what was going on - why they had made it that way.

I used to make polyhedra with my father. There were no clear lines between games and toys for children and his professional work.