Quotes About Mathematics

We don't carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing.

Bits also play a part in logic, that strange blend of philosophy and mathematics for which a primary goal is to determine whether certain statements are true or false. True

Thus, 1 is actually a function with the two bound variables f and x. Just offhand, those two variables seem like two more variables than are needed to define a simple number.

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional.

it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy, of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a zero – and an infinity.

This is the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it.

In the battle between Kronecker and Cantor, Cantor would ultimately prevail. Cantor's theory would show that Kronecker's precious integers-and even the rational numbers-were nothing at all. They were an infinite zero.

Christianity initially rejected zero, but trade would soon demand it. The man who reintroduced zero to the West was Leonardo of Pisa. The son of an Italian trader, he traveled to northern Africa. There the young man-better known as Fibonacci-learned Mathematics from the Muslims and soon became a good mathematician in his own right.

Nature speaks in equations.

Zero is powerful because it is infinity's twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang.

If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.

He went to the board to write lots of Greek symbols and calculus equations. The course had started with cute little things like how people choose between tea and biscuits. It had moved on to scary equations that would dominate exams. The class took mad notes. Kanyashree wrote so hard I could feel the seismic vibrations from her pen's nib.

Statistics are just a way for the mathematician to evangelize his faith.

The Moon and its phases gave man his first calendar. Trying to match that calendar with the seasons helped give him mathematics. The usefulness of the calendar helped give rise to the thought of beneficent gods. And with all that the Moon is beautiful, too.

...Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind should for a moment touch truth.

To know exactly where the zodiac sign is, multiply the day of the month by the sign, then find a dividend that will go into a divider four times without any remains, subtract this from the sign, add the first quotient to the last divider, then multiply the whole of the man's body by all the signs, and the result will be just what you are looking after.

Aprill, June, and September, Thirty daies have as November; Ech month else doth never vary From thirty-one, save February; Wich twenty-eight doth still confine, Save on Leap-yeare, then twenty-nine.

Days twenty-eight in second month appear, And one day more is added each leap year: The fourth, eleventh, ninth, and sixth months run To thirty days, — the rest to thirty-one.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

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.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.