Quotes About Mathematics

People think that the arts are optional and they aren't. They teach a level of emotional depth that's equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there's no calculator for human interaction.

I was performing at a New Jersey high school, and I asked a class of 2,000 students, 'How many of you love mathematics?' and only one hand went up. And that was the hand of the maths teacher!

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Why don't we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they'd also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.

I cannot recall a period when I did not draw; and at school, the studies that were distasteful to me, mathematics and grammar, were retarded by the indulgence of teachers who were proud of my drawing faculties, and passed over my neglect of uncongenial subjects.

At Tenafly High, I was lucky to have some dedicated teachers; I'm especially indebted to my calculus instructor, Francis Piersa, who opened my eyes to the striking beauty of mathematics.

If I'm teaching girls that do love to make cookies and do love fashion - that they can use math as a part of that - you think that's me saying, come on girls you belong in the kitchen, you belong shopping? Or, do you think it's me showing them how math is part of all their life, even the part they thought it had nothing to do with?

If you understand compound interest, you basically understand the universe.

Mathematically-minded persons will thus perceive immediately that the magnitude scale is a logarithmic one and that the number 2.512 is the fifth root of 100.

The folks who think that code will one day disappear are like mathematicians who hope one day to discover a mathematics that does not have to be formal. They are hoping that one day we will discover a way to create machines that can do what we want rather than what we say. These machines will have to be able to understand us so well that they can translate vaguely specified needs into perfectly executing programs that precisely meet those needs. This will never happen.

Ultimately, we can say that mathematics is the discipline of proving provable statements true. Science, in contrast, is the discipline of proving provable statements false.

The integers of death.

Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package.

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting. He had nothing. And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks- notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.

Viewed one way, then, for at least five years between 1904 and 1909, Ramanujan floundered- mostly out of school, without a degree, without contact with other mathematicians. And yet, was the cup half-empty or half-full?

A pure mathematician must leave to happier colleagues the great task of alleviating the sufferings of humanity.

Then, too, it seems certain, in light of future events, simple racism was a factor; Ramanujan, after all, was a black man.

Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.

At this point he quit, right in the middle of an important and promising piece of work. He now saw his colleagues partly as relentless, obsessive public prosecutors and security chiefs of logic, and partly as opium eaters, addicts of some strange pale drug that filled their world with visions of numbers and abstract relations. God help me, he thought, surely I never could have meant to spend all my life as a mathematician?

multiplication is vexation, division is as bad, the rule of three perplexes me and fractions drive me mad! (the story girl)

The only thing you can be sure of in this world is the multiplication table.