Quotes About Mathematics

To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.

Numbers behave, words do not.

This is how I thought of it. An intuitive link, a reciprocal, one number related to another in such a way that when multiplied together, day or night, their product is one.

Alfonse invested everything he did with a sense of all-consuming purpose. He knew four languages, had photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head. He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong. That is why we have the multiple social and behavioral sciences, with a good dash of mathematics, economics, computer science, information science, and neuroscience.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

Mathematics is to the scientist and the engineer a tool, to the professional mathematician a religion, but to the ordinary person a stumbling-block.

to get anywhere worth while without the higher mathematics is not only impossible but that it would be vaguely immoral if you could.

The science of elasticity is about the interactions between forces and deflections.

strain is a ratio, which is to say a number, and it has no units, SI, British or anything else. All

It has been noted that one needs only 39 digits of Pi to make a circle the size of the observable universe accurate to one atom of hydrogen.

We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols in it. And all the difficult paradoxes which go right back to Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.

Dos y dos son cuatro, pero no a veces, ¡Sino siempre!

If you want a branch of mathematics, you develop it in the physical context, not as something separate, which you then try to apply, rather than integrating it from the beginning.

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the ameteur for three, or the cry of the critc for five. (from Whistler vs. Ruskin, 1878)

Te sorprenderás del montón de problemas matemáticos que resuelves al día sin darte cuenta

Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater. Albert Einstein.

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

Theoretical economists use their mathematical prowess the way the great stags of the forest use their antlers: to do battle with one another and to establish dominance.

If the chemistry was too simple and the complexity of the interactions was too low, then nothing would happen; the system would be "subcritical." But if the complexity of the interactions was rich enough-and Kauffman's mathematics now allowed him to define precisely what that meant-then the system would be "supercritical." Autocatalysis would be inevitable. And the order really would be for free.

And when he finally plotted it all up, there it was: the number of cell types in an organism did indeed scale roughly as the square root of the number of genes it had.

To me, coming from applied mathematics, a theorem was a statement about an everlasting mathematical truth—not the dressing up of a trivial observation in a lot of formalism.

It didn't take very long for Arthur to realize that, when it came to real-world complexities, the elegant equations and the fancy mathematics he'd spent so much time on in school were no more than tools—and limited tools at that. The crucial skill was insight, the ability to see connections.