Quotes About Mathematics

Richard Feynman showed that anti-matter is identical, mathematically, to ordinary matter traveling backward in time. He

I'm told it's a stunning advance in the mathematics and physics of the Calabi-Yau manifold. I had no idea what this was. But my science people tell me it's a six-dimensional space that results when the ten dimensions of superstring theory are rolled up.

Really crazy stuff. I think they call it abstract math. What he created was usually beyond me, even conceptually.

Bobbie Fischer was considered the greatest chess player who ever lived, and he ended up losing complete touch with reality. John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who developed game theory, was debilitated by paranoid schizophrenia. There are

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. —Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

Bertrand Russell once said, "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty. . . .

Modeling the world mathematically is as uniquely a human trait as language or art, but you would rarely find anyone complaining of being "reduced to a poem" or "reduced to a painting.

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

If the answer isn't clear to you, you're not alone—even mathematicians argue about what it means to assign a probability to a single event.

In my life there are not that many questions I can't properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table.

Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself.

What mathematics are to matter and force, occult science is to life and consciousness.

Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.

The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.

In real life a right-angled triangle is very unlikely to have a square on its hypotenuse.

the author of Beat the Dealer and a mathematics professor who devised a winning card-counting system on a high-speed computer.

We think that the demands of any given task are focused in the area of our goal, such as mathematical computation. But within the way we present a task, we often create demands that are not relevant to the goals or purposes of the lesson or task. For instance, consider the classic case of the word problem. We think the demands of the task are about math, but there are of course also reading demands that confound our understanding of students' successes or failures.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

In 1960, I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at UNAM, as this was then the closest way to become a physical chemist, taking math-oriented courses not available to chemistry majors.

I preferred to use mathematics in some practical fashion and thought that meteorology sounded promising.

There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?

Compound interest is proof of gods existence.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.