Quotes About Mathematics

As far back as about the year 400 A.D., St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa and one of the great fathers of Christianity, had this to say: The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

I took a course called Statistical Analysis. And there was a guy in the course who used to make up all his computations, and he never used sigma. He used his own initials. Because he was the standard deviation.

I took a course at Cal once called Statistical Analysis. And there was a guy in the course who used to make up all of his computations and he never used Sigma. He used his own initials. 'Cause he was the standard deviation.

Love in the 21st century is an immersion in greedy mathematics.

Everyone believes in zero as a number, but we always ignore it when counting. We start at one.

Maths seem to be based on predestination. You have the question, but the answer is already there. Your task is to get it correct, no matter how many times you have failed.

Once you know the usefulness of mathematics, you will have no choice but to fall in love with it. It is for adventurers who seek the absolute truth, both in the world and in the universe.

Pure mathematics is useless to ordinary people, but useful to those who wish to understand Absolute Truth, God or Infinity. Applied maths is useful in our daily life.

The main benefit of maths is to reduce superstitions, dogmas, and increase your confidence in finding facts.

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Faraday's self-education was deficient in one significant respect: he had learned no mathematics. For him, Ampère's equations might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models.

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The advancement and perfection of mathematics are ultimately connected with the prosperity of the state.

The physicist Eugene Wigner talked of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics"—in delineating the present, disinterring the past, and baking a trustier fortune cookie.

Drama is imagination limited by logic. Mathematics is logic limited by imagination.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

It still amazes me that we insist on teaching algebra to all students when only about 20 percent will ever use it and fail to teach anything about parenting when the vast majority of our students will become parents.

We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.

Las matemáticas son la poesía del principio de identidad.

Some saw cryptography as a great technological equalizer, a mathematical tool that would put the lowliest privacy-seeking individual on the same footing as the greatest national intelligence agencies.

The abstract, curvilinear motifs of ancient Islamic decorative art found in mosaics and carpet design appear again and again at all scales of magnification on the boundary of the Mandelbrot set.

Research employing fractal rules has revealed a three-quarter power law even in the circulatory system.

Self-similarity on all scales is a key factor in understanding and describing nature's phenomena.

Fractal image compression can even guess, by interpolation, what lies outside the frame of a picture.