Quotes About Numbers

It's very rare that someone who is so good at the language of numbers, is as good at the language of life. They're two very different worlds.

But I wasn't happy... when I heard you two had assaulted Castle Macindaw with just thirty men,' [said Halt]. 'Thirty-three,' mumbled Horace... The Ranger gave him a withering look. 'Oh, pardon me... three more men does make a lot of difference.

One man may be deceit. Two can be conspiracy. Three is the number I trust.

Het was tien tegen tien. En dus was het geen eerlijk gevecht, legde Svengal later uit, want ze waren dus eigenlijk met drie keer zoveel als de tegenstander.

The claim that the only constraints on our success are the limits of our imagination, although generally false, has lifted hearts for millennia. Grand visions take precedence over prosaic numbers.

There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity.

It's strange. With all this harmonious interplay of numbers you would have expected the whole system to be a precisely coherent whole. It isn't. There are echoes here from the scientific view of a world formed by broken symmetry, subject to quantum uncertainty and (so far) defying a precise comprehensive 'theory of everything'. Is this why the 'near miss' is so often more beautiful than perfection?

Interestingly, it is the play between imaginary and real numbers that effortlessly produces the beautiful complexity of fractals and chaos theory, models of the recursive shapes and processes we find all around us in nature.

Twelve is the number which fits around one in three dimensions in the same way that six fits around one in two dimensions. The New Testament is a story of a teacher surrounded by twelve disciples.

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game To find a way to say that life has just begun

I'm a numbers guy. I was a math major at UConn back in the day." He pumps a fist. "Go Huskies!

The only God is in the numbers and the fire; in the equations and the furnace

It'll turn out you mean love,' Sholto said. 'At the moment math is the only thing that excites you so you're nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you'll be telling me about some boy.

For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals.

There is no event in Nature," Galileo wrote, "such that it will be completely understood by theorists."36 God's perfection was to be found in the numbers, not in the shapes or objects. Yet without real objects, the math can become an exercise in pure speculation or even hallucination, as Giordano Bruno's life revealed.

Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.

Out of the numbers proceeds that harmony of natural law which it is the aim of science to disclose. We can grasp the tune but not the player. Trinculo might have been referring to modern physics in the words: 'This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.

Sometimes," he said at last, as if it were an enormous effort to formulate his thoughts, "I wonder if chess is something man invented or if he merely discovered it. It's as if it were something that has always been there, since the beginning of the universe. Like whole numbers.

I am naturally drawn to numbers but one of the ironies of working with numbers is that the more I work with them, the more skeptical I become about purely number-driven arguments.

We relate to and remember stories better than we do numbers, but storytelling can lead us into fantasyland quickly

in the hands of a skilled number cruncher, this bias can be hidden far better with numbers than with stories.

Let me chant in sacred numbers, as I strike each sounding string, Chant in sweet, melodious anthems, glorious deeds of Christ our King; He, my Muse, shall be thy story; with His praise my lyre shall ring.

Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.

Mathematicians say that numbers progress from one to two to three to many. Its is the number three that unlocks the possibility of infinite diversity. Infinite, unmanifested origin is one. Duality is two.