Quotes About Mathematics

When Galileo divided experienced reality into two spheres, a subjective sphere, which he chose to exclude from science, and an objective sphere, freed theoretically from man's visible presence, but known through rigorous mathematical analysis, he was dismissing as unsubstantial and unreal the cultural accretions of meaning that had made mathematics-itself a purely subjective distillation-possible.

We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Critics of 'economic sciences' sometimes refer to the development of a 'pseudoscience' of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show.

My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.

All of us are somewhat clairvoyant; any future you can dream up, no matter how bizarre, retains the faint possibility of coming true. Kevin's skill was of dreaming up future events that were not just possible, but likely. He once said, Being a clairvoyant is ten percent guesswork and ninety percent probability mathematics.

Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

There are a lot of very strong connections with music and mathematics. They both can work in patterns and sequences and repetitions.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.

God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man.

Meton (astronomer in 5th century BC): With the straight ruler I set to work To make the circle four-cornered .