Quotes About Mathematics

10. About these coincidences, the data and mathematicians are clear: Such things happen all the time. Then again, Einstein (pretty good at math) was also quite clear when he concluded, There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. 11. I'm going with B, everything.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't three lefts make a right? Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't two negatives make a positive?

He called the scientific subjects 'low cunning', and would sniff and say, 'This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!

David Hilbert, the towering mathematical intellect of the previous thirty years, had put it thus:9 'Mathematics knows no races … for mathematics, the whole cultural world is a single country'

In 1897, Indiana State Legislature House Bill No. 246 attempted to decree that henceforth ? should have the value of 3. The Bill was tabled indefinitely at its second reading when a mathematics professor pointed out that their powers did not quite extend to passing laws of nature.

When a king asked Euclid, the mathematician, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner? he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry.

APOTOME  (APO'TOME)   n.s.[from    to cut off.]1.In mathematicks,the remainder or difference of two incommensurable quantities.2.In musick

ALIQUANT  (A'LIQUANT)   adj.[aliquantus, Lat.]Parts of a number, which, however repeated, will never make up the number exactly; as, 3 is an aliquant of 10, thrice 3 being 9, four times 3 making 12.

A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.

For example, knowing that it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass, gives one a better grasp of the relative magnitudes of these two common numbers.

A study indicates that whether or not a department has a mathematics or a statistics requirement is the most important single determinant of where a woman will attend graduate school to study political science.

Mathematical studies may serve for a pleasant entertainment for those hours which young men are apt to throw away upon their vices.

What I have said may serve to recommend mathematics for acquiring a vigorous constitution of mind; for which purpose they are as useful as exercise is for procuring health and strength to the body.

Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.

Such simple questions as How many feet are in a mile? or What's the number of square feet in an acre? produce the not-so-simple answers of 5,280 and 43,560.

Jefferson offered a simpler plan: Adopt the Spanish dollar. But with a twist. Rather than splitting it into eighths and sixteenths or twelfths and twentieths, Jefferson wanted to take the radical step of dividing the coin by tenths, hundredths, and thousandths—decimal fractions. It was a thing no other nation in the world had ever entirely achieved, not with coins or any other measure.

it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

CAPTURE CHARLES SEIFE Professor of journalism, NYU; former staff writer, Science; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

The relentless rules of humble arithmetic.

One of the great things about mental math is that the calculations can generally be done from either direction, and a certain symmetry generally is present.

We have never explained the numerical value of any of the constants of Nature.

But, as powerful mathematicians like Minkowski and Hilbert found striking harmony between their pure mathematical results and the workings of the physical world, many found the claims for such a harmony hard to resist. Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, we begin to see why Minkowski's application of complex numbers to the description of space and time was hailed by one physicist as 'one of the greatest revolutions in our accepted views'.

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

There is, as we shall see, a real and precise difference between the number zero and the concept of a set that posesses no members - the null, or empty set. Indeed, the second idea, pointless as it sounds, turns out to be by far the most fruitful of the two. From it, all of the rest of mathematics can be created step by step.