Quotes About Mathematics

An optimist was someone who believed that however complicated or random or odd a stretching curve might seem, if we had enough insight then we could understand the simple guiding principle from which it actually came. The concept then spread from mathematics to mean anyone who believes that such an optimal path can open up in life.

If the line is 50 ft long and it takes 10 seconds to tow it, your boat speed is 0.6 times 50 divided by 10, or 3.0 kts.

There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," said Purves. "That's the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn't have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.

Johannes Kepler published his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In it he proposed that it was the Creator who "decorated" the whole world, using mathematical and musical harmonic proportions. The spiritual and the physical are united.

The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.

For each natural number N, will the guest in room number N please move immediately to room number N (N +1)/2.' Then they announce, 'For all natural numbers N and M, will the Nth passenger from the Mth train please go to room number [(N + M)2 + N – M/2.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

With 80 people, the size of this classroom, the probability that there will be no shared birthdays is so tiny as to be virtually impossible.

Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought.

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.

Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.

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.

in real statistical analyses the computer takes over the tedium of arithmetic juggling.

When the noise died down, she could lose herself in mathematics—in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity—and forget the world around her.

She saw more melody in a differential equation than in a piece by Beethoven.

Prime numbers have become secrecy's best friends.

The astonishing saga of the code breakers is really an example of the power of mathematics. Hardy's "clean and gentle" science, as it turned out, was stronger than the entire German war machine, which, for all its posturing, ended up being trumped by a group of geeky mathematicians and engineers working out their ideas on paper and fitting electrical switches inside ugly-looking machines.

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

God built the universe on numbers.

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

God made the integers, man made the rest.