Quotes About Mathematics

The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.

As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.

I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.

String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.

I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I've also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I've got the skills for both.

If you have two steaks, one that's an inch thick, one that's 2 inches thick, how much longer does the thicker one need to cook? It's four times as long. It goes roughly like the square. How come cookbooks don't tell you that?

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

The building blocks of mathematical thinking are requisite for more advanced conceptualization. If a student is not ready to move on, then the teacher must take time to assist that learner.

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

By dimension, we simply mean an independent direction in which, in principle, you can move; in which motion can take place. In an everyday world, we have left-right as one dimension; we have back-forth as a second one; and we have up-down as a third.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

Mathematics is not merely a tool for commercial transactions but rather a visible expression of the world's beauty and truth

M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato's sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.

When God, the Great Mathematician, discovered that in making man he had overdone things a bit, he created the bedbug to even things out.

In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

Having thus disposed in his merciless way of an incautious adversary, Randolph proceeded to expose the follies of seeking abstract harmony in government, of expecting the great venerable Gothic edifice of society to conform to ideal classical proportions; with Burke, he believed that a state is better governed by the irregular patterns formed by common sense and tradition than by the laws of mathematics and the Procrustean methods of omnipotent majorities.

Spallanzani was a genial, round-faced, baldheaded man who looked a bit like actor Wally Shawn. Born in northern Italy in 1729 to a lawyer and his well-connected wife, at the age of twenty he embarked on the study of law at the University of Bologna, where his cousin Laura Bassi was the first female professor of physics and mathematics in Europe.

Babylonians used 60 as their base (which remains with us today when we talk about each hour having 60 minutes and each circle having 360 degrees; see Section 4) and

Physics is geometric proof on steroids.

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.

Though if you get your ass kicked by a mathematical theorem, don't come crying to me.

Without the idea of the indefinite, mathematics would have halted at addition and subtraction, and never have risen through geometry to astronomy.