Quotes About Mathematics

The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.

Mathematical logic has completely deformed the thinking of mathematicians and philosophers.

Tautology and contradiction are, however, not senseless; they are part of the symbolism, in the same way that "0" is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic.

The logic of the world which the propositions of logic show in tautologies, mathematics shows in equations.

Mathematics is a method of logic.

In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract.

All you have to remember is that every ordinary fraction can be converted into an infinite periodic decimal fraction. See? So is 0.428571.

See? So is 0.428571.

You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have "it" or you don't. But to Schoenfeld, it's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That's what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn't seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what they prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact -- and this is the most heartbreaking part of all -- he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.

Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine.

whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

A volte pensiamo che la bravura in matematica dipenda da un'attitudine innata, che si ha o non si ha. [...] La matematica si impara se si è disposti a fare dei tentativi.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.

It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts.

The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.

A mathematics teacher is a midwife to ideas.

Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.

I want every math teacher to know math. I want every science teacher to have expertise in science. I want them to know how to inspire and engage young people.

It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.