Quotes About Mathematics

For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.

forty-one was a "very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes.

Minkowski spacetime.

Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?

the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe.

Pero nadie pensaba que llegaría muy lejos, porque ni siquiera creo que fuera capaz de integrar e elevado a x. - ¿Es posible tal ignorancia? - preguntó alguien con asombro. - Puede que esté exagerando. Digamos x por e elevado a x.

How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions!

I'd hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen.

The ladies were quite uninterested; either because they did not care for mathematics, or preferred to ignore birthdays.

a real danger by giving it an absurd name, the designations were often facetious: the Godel Gremlin, the Mandelbrot Maze, the Combinatorial Catastrophe, the Transfinite Trap, the Conway Conundrum, the Turing Torpedo, the Lorenz Labyrinth, the Boolean Bomb, the Shannon Snare, the Cantor Cataclysm…

classical Hohmann orbit—

Since their base number system is octal, the range for the comparatives is between one and seven.

Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

Geometria este ?tiin?a care trage concluzii corecte din figuri incorecte

At times it occurs to all of us that it is downright trivial for 2 and 2 to make 4…After all, we have all experienced at least a passing feeling, a longing for a far distant dreamland where 2 and 2 make whatever we wish them to make.

Não existe utilidade prática em saber que Ï€ é irracional, mas, se podemos saber, então certamente seria intolerável não saber.

Rejewski had no idea of the day key, and he had no idea which message keys were being chosen, but he did know that they resulted in this table of relationships. Had

Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that 'the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it'.

As a society, we rightly adore our great musicians and novelists, yet we seldom hear any mention of the humble mathematician. It is clear that mathematics is not considered part of our culture. Instead, mathematics is generally feared and mathematicians are often mocked.

The art of number theory is so abstract that it is frighteningly easy to wander off the path of logic and be completely unaware that one has strayed into absurdity

Previous experience, however, tells us that every so-called unbreakable cipher has, sooner or later, succumbed to cryptanalysis

when not sentencing priests to be burnt at the stake, Fermat dedicated himself to his hobby.

NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world. It is the world leader when it comes to snooping.

Quantum cryptography is an unbreakable system of encryption.