Quotes About Mathematics

So who was it? Who discovered zero?" "An Indian mathematician; we don't know his name. The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing.

If that were the case, they wouldn't be so difficult to understand and there'd be no need for mathematicians.

The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world. Life isn't going to be easier, nor is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers. Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem. …. But those things aren't the goal of mathematics. The only goal is to discover the truth.

I wondered why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers. Amicable numbers or twin primes had a precise quality about them, and yet they sounded as though they'd been taken straight out of a poem.

R0 = ?N/(? + b + v)

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.

In ancient times only women could do math; men were thought too stupid. That's why the root for the word math is the same as for mother—they both come from the name of the Egyptian goddess, Maat. Mathematics literally means 'mother wisdom.

The idea of mathematics having an ontology is the very last idea science would ever accept since its acceptance would instantly falsify science and require its replacement by ontological mathematics. Doesn't it alarm you that science deliberately seeks to reject the very thing – mathematics – on which it is 100% reliant?

There's a simple reason why people don't get involved with reason, logic and mathematics. They find these extremely difficult. There's a simple reason why people get involved with faith, prayer, mysticism, meditation and mindfulness: they're easy! Anyone can do them.

Science is to mathematics as Protestantism is to Catholicism, an irrational protest against reason, based on faith.

The Art of Computer Programming

It is both mysterious and miraculous that roughly the same intelligence necessary to flake a barbed spearpoint is sufficient to discover the theorems of mathematics. In a different universe, it might have been otherwise. And so human beings would have been spared the tragedy of existing half as ape and half as god.

You may think of God as the timeless, eternal universe of mathematics.

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.

Lady Cordelia had been admitted on the strength of a series of papers she had written on the subject of advanced mathematics, and it was good to see that her talents—frequently wasted in arguing with Mrs. Bascombe about the grocer's bills—were once more carrying her into the circles where

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers.

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.

[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.

The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics. That tenet is the foundation of the do-it-yourself, Socratic, or Texas method.

There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics.

la primera teórica de la informática, Ada Lovelace, la matemática que a principios del siglo XIX sentó las bases de las calculadoras mecánicas y predijo que pronto dominarían el mundo. Le pareció que estaba muy bien escrito.