Quotes About Mathematics

Indeed, the quality that made Newton's theories truly stand out-the inherent characteristic that turned them into inevitable laws of nature-was precisely the fact that they were all expressed as crystal-clear, self-consistent mathematical relations.

The Greek excellence in mathematics was largely a direct consequence of their passion for knowledge for its own sake, rather than merely for practical purposes. A story has it that when a student who learned one geometrical proposition with Euclid asked, "But what do I gain from this?" Euclid told his slave to give the boy a coin, so that the student would see an actual profit.

The result that Noether obtained was stunning. She showed that to every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics there corresponds a conservation law and vice versa.

Exponential progression is compound doubling. Four times four equals sixteen.

Actually, science has determined that a flipped coin is not strictly a fifty-fifty proposition," said Ajay. "Surprisingly, the coin will return to whichever side you're holding faceup in your hand before it is flipped, exactly fifty-one percent of the time.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

To exist (in mathematics), said Henri Poincaré, is to be free from contradiction. But mere existence does not guarantee survival. To survive in mathematics requires a kind of vitality that cannot be described in purely logical terms.

The evidence demonstrates that an average worker who retired in 2011 would have paid $60,000 in Medicare-related taxes yet received $170,000 in benefits.18 This system cannot last forever, and it will not, given reality and mathematics. Indeed, in 2014, the trustees overseeing Medicare declared that the HI trust fund will run dry in 2030.

With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

It is utterly implausible that a mathematical formula should make the future known to us, and those who think it can would once have believed in witchcraft.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.

Women have a passion for mathematics. They divide their age in half, double the price of their clothes, and always add at least five years to the age of their best friend.

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

alpha, beta, gamma, delta

Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned.

Agnes Tattle was the only person he'd ever met who was strong enough to look life right in the eye and spit. It must be the mathematics in her background. Such courageous realism certainly didn't come from the study of English literature.

The Rail Fence Cipher Suppose

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

Marriage is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.