Quotes About Mathematics

Linearity is a reductionist's dream, and nonlinearity can sometimes be a reductionist's nightmare. Understanding the distinction between linearity and nonlinearity is very important and worthwhile. To

idea models—models that are simple enough to study via mathematics or computers but that nonetheless capture fundamental properties of natural complex systems.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

At every major step, physics has required, and frequently stimulated, the introduction of new mathematical tools and concepts. Our present understanding of the laws of physics, with their extreme precision and universality, is only possible in mathematical terms.

From an intuitionistic standpoint, mathematics, when correctly carried on, would not need any justification from without, a buttress from the side or a foundation from below: it would wear its own justification on its face.

I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject, and then wondered to see that the subject stood it so well. [Letter to James Clerk Maxwell, 25 March 1857, commenting on Maxwell's paper titled "On Faraday's Lines of Force"]

Bohr: You never cared what got destroyed on the way, though. As long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied. Heisenberg: If something works it works. Bohr: But the question is always, What does the mathematics mean, in plain language? What are the philosophical implications?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

Not your view, I know—you'd be happy to describe what you were up to purely in differential equations if you could—" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen".

Today's self-multiplying debt overhead absorbs profits, rents, personal income and tax revenue in a process whose mathematics is much like that of environmental pollution. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson demonstrates how impossible it is for growth to proceed at exponential rates without encountering a limit. He cites "the arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pod is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double

This is the political dimension of the mathematics of compound interest. It is the pro-rentier policy that the French Physiocrats and British liberals sought to reverse by clearing away the legacy of European feudalism.

A whole genre of rock, called math rock, is based on using complex time signatures, such as 7/8, 11/8, 13/8, and so on, in order to break away from the 4/4 time that's the standard in rock.

When the lessons of symbolic or philosophical mathematics seen in nature, which were designed into religious architecture or art, are applied functionally (not just intellectually) to facilitate the growth and transformation of consciousness, then mathematics may rightly be called "sacred.

Theoretically, there is no end to the trail of squares cut out of a continually resurrecting golden rectangle, seducing the squares forever onward.

We] cannot and should not expect to rediscover the full body of ancient wisdom by studying dusty monuments and myths full of idioms and subtle references understood only by those who lived at the time. The perennial wisdom requires each individual and age to discover it anew in external mathematics, expressing it in ways and symbols suitable for those times and cultures.

seven was known as the number of the "virgin" because no number below seven enters into (divides) it, nor does it "reproduce" another number within the first ten.

All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures…From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. —Sir James H. Jeans (1877–1946, English physicist, astronomer, and writer)

I forget if it was the Mathematician of Alexandria who said that geometry is beauty laid bare or the Father of Relativity who made the claim for physics," Darger said. "She is, in either case, ravishing.

Vitruvius discovered that the length of a man's ear is one-third of the length of his face, and the length of a man's foot is one-sixth of his height. As a child, I was asked to measure the distance from the tip of my head to the floor and divide it by the distance from my belly button to the ground. The number I came up with is the same number that nearly everyone will. A ratio of 1.618.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, all rolled into one.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

Toda ley es una ley de ritmo, y el ritmo es el amor. He aquí que la divina mañana, virginidad del día, me trae un descubrimiento: el amor es el ritmo. La ciencia del ritmo son las matemáticas; la expresión sensible del amor es la música.

El amor es el ritmo. La ciencia del ritmo son las matemáticas; la expresión sensible del amor es la música. La expresión, no su realización; entendámonos.

el amor es el ritmo. La ciencia del ritmo son las matemáticas; la expresión sensible del amor es la música.

Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fial to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.