Quotes About Mathematics

was slow to speak, but he was not, as legend has it, slow in his studies; he consistently earned the highest or next-highest marks in mathematics and Latin in school and Gymnasium. At four or five the "miracle" of a compass his father showed him excited him so much, he remembered, that he "trembled and grew cold." It seemed to him then that "there had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden."624

The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers.

The forms of mathematics, the harmonies of music, the motions of the planets, and the gods of the mysteries were all essentially related for Pythagoreans, and the meaning of that relation was revealed in an education that culminated in the human soul's assimilation to the world soul, and thence to the divine creative mind of the universe.

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.

Never mind, Leo said. I'm pretty sure pi is, uh, 3.1415 blah blah blah. The number goes on forever, but the sphere has only five rings, so that should be enough, if I'm right. And if you're not? Frank asked. Well, then, Leo fall down, go boom. Let's find out!

What was an actuary? Juliet wondered. It sounded as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary.)

The "trick" is to develop formal mathematical definitions that have known graph theoretic properties, and also capture important intuitive and theoretical aspects of cohesive subgroups.

He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention.

Era como tener que resolver un problema de matemáticas cuando tienes la mente exhausta, y sabes que existe una solución remota pero no puedes reunir la energía suficiente para tratar de dar con ella. Algo en mí tiró la toalla.

For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instead, the focus is on learning and applying various procedures to solve math problems. That's a bit like explaining soccer by saying it is executing a series of maneuvers to get the ball into the goal. Both accurately describe various key features, but they miss the what? and the why? of the big picture.

A significant difference between Pacioli's book and Treviso Arithmetic is that Pacioli dealt with negative numbers. The concept of negative numbers was new in Europe, and Pacioli is believed to have provided the first printed explanation.

Having described the basic methods of Hindu-Arabic arithmetic in the first seven chapters, Leonardo devoted most of the remainder of the book to practical problems. Chapters 8 and 9 provide dozens of worked examples on buying, selling, and pricing merchandise, using what we would today call reasoning by proportions—the math we use to check the best deal in the supermarket.

The number system we use today—the Hindu-Arabic system—was developed in India and seems to have been completed by around 700 CE. Indian mathematicians made advances in what would today be described as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, much of their work being motivated by an interest in astronomy. The system is based on three key ideas: notations for the numerals, place value, and zero.

How do we educate such individuals? We concentrate on the conceptual thinking that lies behind all the specific techniques of mathematics. Remember that old adage, "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime."? It's the same for mathematics education for twenty-first century life.

In year three, he became two years old, and so on. So this year, nine hundred and ninety-seven, he becomes nine hundred and ninety-six.

My stepfather, the builder, taught me how to perform certain operations in geometry: how to divide a line exactly in half, how to draw a right angle, and how to draw one square inside another so that the smaller is half the area of the larger.

that the order of numbers in the

For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.

We have not begun to understand the relationship between combinatorics and conceptual mathematics.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.

Yes, it is indeed by way of the mathematical forms that the physicist gains knowledge of the external world; Eddington's point, however, is that the forms in question have been artificially imposed: "The mathematics is not there until we put it there." And it is for this reason, and in this sense, that our knowledge of mathematical structures—our knowledge of the physical world!—is said to be subjective.

The so-called physical universe—"the world so described"—turns out to be constituted by mathematical structures which we ourselves have imposed; in a word, it proves to be "man-made." Yet this way of putting it is also misleading; for inasmuch as physical knowledge is partly objective, "the world so described" must be "partly objective" as well. One is left with a curiously equivocal conception, which may enlighten the wise but is bound to deceive the unwary

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!