Quotes About Mathematics

Taken together, they laid the future cornerstone of what comes to be called calculus, or the mathematics of infinity (Archimedes was the first mathematician to use the concept of infinity in his work). Without it, modern math and science as we know it would not exist.

God is always doing geometry. —Saying attributed to Plato

Where do we find love and comfort in this comfortless, mechanical world? And above all, More wanted to know, where is God? Descartes's answer was confident and pat. God was the omnipotent Legislator who has made everything and installed all the necessary rules that govern the universe, including the laws of mathematics, rather the way the manufacturer installs software on a new Android. Then God steps aside and lets His creation "do its thing.

And every minute Newton didn't spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.

In some ways, Bacon also looked beyond Aristotle. First, he believed that no natural or physical science could get anywhere without a firm foundation in mathematics. He called it the "gate and key" to all science.

Using his observations of the different shadows cast by sundials along the same meridian and a little number crunching, Eratosthenes made a calculation of the earth's diameter that was amazingly accurate: 7,850 miles, only about 60 off the actual mark.

All around him were stacks of books in Arabic on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, physics, and philosophy by various Greek and Arabic authorities. They included many works by Aristotle that no one in western Europe had opened in six hundred years.

For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals.

Galileo's science managed to fuse the Platonist's faith in mathematics with the Aristotelian faith in experience as the basis of discovery. All his work on mechanics, optics, and astronomy was deeply rooted in experiment and empirical research. When experience proved ambiguous or unreliable, however, Galileo realized then that mathematics must take over.

The universe, Galileo wrote, "is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single world of it." Without mathematics, he concluded, "one wanders about in a dark labyrinth"—or what Plato might have called a cave.

In truth, a good master mason could build an entire Gothic cathedral with just a compass and a T square, a device he borrowed from Greek mathematicians for lining up perfect vertical and horizontal lines. This dazzling command of practical geometry made the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages truly independent businessmen. By the fourteenth century, they were already calling themselves free masons.

The philosophy wars in Athens between 300 and 200 BCE weary readers and scholars alike. What matters here is that they knocked mathematics and science out from the pride of place they had occupied in Plato's Academy. Plato had wanted all his students to be master mathematicians and astronomers, as well as exemplars of virtue, especially since he believed knowledge of the one pointed the way to understanding of the other.

Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic." - Liebniz

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

If you are smart enough to add letters to math problems, you're smart enough to dig your own grave.

Geceleri bile, daha ÅŸimdiden, uykumda matematik yap?yorum. Dün gece örneÄŸin, iki defa uyan?p ka??da kaleme sar?ld?m. Yaln?zl?k hayal alemini, matematik de soyutlama kabiliyetini aç?yor; korkunç ÅŸeyler hayal ediyorum. Hayret, insan nas?l da kendini verdiÄŸi bilimle özdeÅŸleÅŸiyor. -Ali Nesin

A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.

Mathematics is not how fast you calculate, rather mathematics is how well you understand. Because a calculator can solve faster than anyone, but is unable to understand the difficult problems of differential calculus and integration.

I use the golden ratio to create the perfect shape on my clients' faces.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

I am a passionate reader, having been tutored very early by my mother. I avidly devoured all books on chemistry that I could find. Formal chemistry at school seemed boring by comparison, and my performance was routine. In contrast, I did spectacularly well in mathematics and sailed through classes and exams with ease.

Artists realise that mathematicians have a way of looking at the world that can make them see things differently.

By seventh grade, I was committed to mathematics.