Quotes About Mathematics

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

He was a slow learner but patient and persistent and, like J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould, exhibited a terrific head for math.

a negative charge moving backward in time is mathematically equivalent to a positive charge moving forward in time!

Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.

He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.

Perhaps he would glance down and see that he was doing 76 miles an hour, and he would see that 76 squared was 5,776, which ended in 76, where it started, which made 76 an automorphic number, one of only two below 100, the other being 25, whose square was 625, whose square was 390,625, which

Tiempo. La distancia dividida por la velocidad es igual al tiempo».

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

Upon learning of the young man's interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, "In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.

What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.

claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation—the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university.

the same mathematics that describes drawing pebbles from an urn can be employed to describe any series of trials in which each trial has two possible outcomes, as long as those outcomes are random and the trials are independent of each other.

Jakob Bernoulli had shown that through mathematical analysis one could learn how the inner hidden probabilities that underlie natural systems are reflected in the data those systems produce.

that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11

law of large numbers is employed because, as we've said, Bernoulli's theorem concerns the way results reflect underlying probabilities when we make a large number of observations.

No human investigation can be called real knowledge if it does not pass through mathematical demonstrations; and if you say that the kinds of knowledge that begin and end in the mind have any value as truth, this cannot be conceded, but rather must be denied for many reasons, and first of all because in such mental discussions there is no experimentation, without which nothing provides certainty of itself.

Whatever— the soup is getting cold. [Last sentence of a mathematical theorem in Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, 1518]

Mathematics, such as appertain to painting, are necessary to the painter, also the absence of companions who are alien to his studies: his brain must be versatile and susceptible to the variety of objects which it encounters, and free from distracting cares.

A bird is like an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument

I'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!

Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ... [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.

which is 1.5 squares.