Quotes About Mathematics

Que l'écolier, de temps à autre, rencontre un professeur dont l'enthousiasme semble considérer les mathématiques en elles-mêmes, qui les enseigne comme un des Beaux-Arts, qui les fait aimer par la vertu de sa propre vitalité, grâce à qui l'effort devienne un plaisir, cela tient au hasard de la rencontre, pas au génie de l'Institution. (p.89)

Che l'allievo di tanto in tanto incontri un professore pieno di entusiasmo che sembra considerare la matematica per se stessa, e la insegna come una delle Belle Arti e la fa amare in virtù della sua personale vitalità, e grazie al quale lo sforzo diventa un piacere, questo dipende dalla casualità dell'incontro, non dalla genialità dell'Istituzione.

Unlike people, numbers never lied.

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

What would it be like, a world without snow? I cannot imagine such a place. It would be like a world devoid of numbers. Every snowflake, unique as every number, tells us something about complexity. Perhaps that is why we will never tire of its wonder.

like literary fiction, mathematical imagination entertains pure possibilities.

Gottfried Leibniz wrote that music's pleasure consisted of "unconscious counting" or an "arithmetical exercise of which we are unaware.

numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, there will be a 14 percentage-point increase in STEM jobs between 2010 and 2020.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

Albert Einstein once said that the most miraculous phenomenon he knew was the miracle of compound interest.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

By any measure the mathematics of the engagement were preposterously against them. The Yamato displaced nearly seventy thousand tons. She alone matched almost exactly in weight all thirteen ships of Taffy 3. Each of her three main gun turrets weighed more than an entire Fletcher-class destroyer.

The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics.

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason?

distance = (speed) × (time).

She ruminated, wondering in terms of ration, quotient, multiplicand, root, power, infinity, surd.

Two and two the mathematician continues to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

the number of imaginary sheep in this world remains a matter of guesswork, who is richer or poorer for it? No, sir; I'm not their scorekeeper. Let them count themselves, if they're so crazy mad after mathematics. Let them do their own dirty work. Coming around here, at this time of day, and asking me to count them!

Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word values. An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote: God made the integers; all else is the work of man. Oh, bother! cried the Dean. Do let's keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them.

Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.