Quotes About Numbers

I was impressed by the delicate weaving of the numbers. No matter how carefully you unraveled a thread, a single moment of inattention could leave you stranded, with no clue what to do next. In all his years of study, the Professor had managed to glimpse several pieces of the lace. I could only hope that some part of him remembered the exquisite pattern.

The square root sign is a study one. It shelters all the numbers.

Two is the only even prime.

Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

The smallest perfect number is 6: 6 = 1 + 2 + 3.

There are lots of deficient numbers that are just one larger than the sum of their divisors, but there are no abundant numbers that are just one smaller than the sum of theirs.

And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

he had discovered the natural connection between numbers that seemed completely unrelated.

In the midst of a vast field of numbers, a straight path opened before my eyes.

That's right! The sum of the factors of 220 is 284, and the sum of the factors of 284 is 220. They're called 'amicable numbers,' and they're extremely rare.

I ran my fingers over the lines of the formula, a long chain of numbers and symbols that flowed from one page to the next. As I followed the chain, link by link, the room faded and I found myself in a dark, silent place of numbers. But I felt no fear, certain in the knowledge that the Professor would guide me toward eternal, unchangeable truths.

Whether at his desk or at the dinner table, when he talked about numbers, primes were most likely to make an appearance. At first, it was hard to see their appeal. They seemed so stubborn, resisting division by any number but one and themselves. Still, as we were swept up in the Professor's enthusiasm, we gradually came to understand his devotion, and the primes began to seem more real, as though we could reach out and touch them.

Later in conversation he corrected himself: It was in fact 1.1 million pigs. The difference might seem like just a rounding error, he told me, but if you ever had to kill an "extra" hundred thousand pigs and dispose of their bodies in bulldozed pits, you'd remember the difference as significant.

Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It's caused by a paramyxovirus

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

He thought again of the watch in the window. It had twelve black numbers on its moon face and there was magic to that. For these were numbers that were not really numbers at all but letters like in words. He shivered at the possibilities of such untold magic.

Words described real experiences, and their curves and lines left a mental trail for me to follow by sense memory, whereas numbers threw curves at me and stonewalled me with their lines, barring me from understanding them, where they came from, and where they went. Math did not describe anything to me; if people themselves were often disconnected parts—sometimes one, sometimes many—how could I hope to quantify the rest of the world? Discrete amounts had little meaning for me.

Hundreds,' Joe says. 'Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I'm old.' So old, Jesus was in your math class,' I say. I crack myself up.

Logic is the mirror of thought, and not vice versa;in classes, relations et nombres; essai sur les groupements de logistique et la réversibilitié de lq pensée

The strange word nymphomation, used to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers, rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other to produce new numbers.

Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.

By the time of Redux's first shipment to pharmacy shelves in May, PPH numbers were rising rapidly.

Perhaps a way to think together all the members of a set is to attend to a certain property and then consider all the things that have that property: e.g., all the natural numbers. Then many infinite sets are sets that could have been collected by human beings; but not nearly all--not, e.g., arbitrary collections of real numbers. (axiom of choice)

There are too many of numbers for them to arise as a result of human intellectual activity. Consider, for example, the following series of functions: 2 lambda n is two to the second to the second .... to the second n times. The second member is ##2 (n); the third 3#2(n), etc.