Quotes About Mathematics

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle's diameter into its circumference.

I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they've intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven

I tried to dig out of the computer a call directory for Luna. But it was still sulking. I could not get it to list its own directory. So I tried some test problems on it. It insisted that 2 + 2 = 3.99999999999999999999999.... When I tried to get it to admit that 4 = 2 + 2, it became angry and claimed that 4 = 3.141592653589793238462643383279... So I gave up.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes.

Math is hard work and it occupies your mind—and it doesn't hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.

Her calculations were sometimes a little fuzzy, for the same reason that her checkbook sometimes did not balance; Becky Vesey (as she had been known as a child) had never really mastered the multiplication tables and she was inclined to confuse sevens with nines.

Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.

hurry" was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion.

Escape speed is not a vector quantity; it is scalar.

I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such asexpropriating the expropriators, an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty, they did it to me so I can do it to them, and, in general, the emotional mathematics of one plus one equals zero (1 + 1 = 0). The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)

If you told that to the Incredible Randi, he would insist some fraud or hoax existed. Yet such non-local correlations appear mathematically necessary to Quantum Mechanics and experiments have measured them repeatedly.

Or, as Einstein once said — quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity — Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.

In modern mathematics, information content has a precise numerical value, based on the reverse of the probability that you can predict it in advance. Thus, an astrology column has virtually no information, a great poem has high information, and the ravings of an acute schizophrenic have such enormous information that nobody can predict them or make use of them.

In Zadeh's math, we can say "This animal belongs 90% to the fish family and 10% to the amphibian family." "This animal belongs 60% to the ape family and 40% to the hominid family." See? Just like the Coke can contains 60 % coke and 40% air. I told you I wouldn't leave us wandering in the dark with the Fundamentalists . . .

The reader terrorized by mathematics (persuaded by incompetent teachers that I can't understand that stuff) need not panic.

An accident of the formalism is something that is mathematically useful, even necessary perhaps to the elegance of the equations, but has no measurable consequence in the experimental world.

Information, mathematician Norbert Wiener once said, consists of signals that you do not expect. Remember?

Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this metaprogramming hall of mirrors when Schrödinger demonstrated that quantum events are not objective" in the Newtonian sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan.

If Nietzsche's existential relativism be accepted, then there will always be true things that do not fit any existing reality-tunnel, just as in mathematics Godel demonstrated that there will always be true theorems not deducible from any set of axioms. (See Chapter Two.)

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).