Quotes About Mathematics

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

the line of mathematical imagination and that of philological critique seem to have faced each other in mutual incomprehension through the centuries

Se você é jovem, inteligente e se interessa por política, pense bem antes de estudar ciências políticas na universidade. Você deveria se interessar, em vez disso, em estudar matemática ou física. Num segundo momento você poderá entrar na política e terá conhecimentos mais úteis, com aplicações infinitas [...] Pode-se sempre ler livros de história mais tarde, mas não é possível aprender matemática na hora que se quer.

Whatever the superior group has will be used as proof of its superiority. Thus, if men could menstruate, it would become a great thing. Without this inbuilt measure of time and the movements of the universe, how could any woman become a mathematician? An astronomer?

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

They quickly discerned the advantages of utilizing columns of numbers or place numbers in the style of Arabic numerals, and they introduced the use of zero, negative numbers, and algebra in China.

the word algorithm was derived from al Khwarizm

I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon , of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.

IN THE MIND'S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

THE MANDELBROT SET IS the most complex object in mathematics, its admirers like to say. An eternity could not be enough time to see it all, its disks studded with prickly thorns, its spirals and filaments curling outward and around, bearing bulbous molecules that hang, infinitely variegated, like grapes on God's personal vine.

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.

Although I liked especially physics and mathematics for which I had considerable talent, I decided to study medicine. This profession had for me a strong emotional appeal, which was reinforced by having an uncle who was an excellent surgeon.

I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and Gibbs States Multiplicity for Ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller Models on Two Dimensions, or Z2.

As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math.

To see, once again, that African American students are more likely to have a limited math curriculum and an underpaid novice teacher is disheartening and should be a call to action for policymakers and educators.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.

How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?

Let's face it; by and large math is not easy, but that's what makes it so rewarding when you conquer a problem, and reach new heights of understanding.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.