Quotes About Mathematics

Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

If he drinks one hundred dollars a day--and he can--he's got one hundred days to drink. It's just an arithmetic operation, simple logic.

Geometry is a Deductive Science.

Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.

Se la gente non crede che la matematica è semplice, è solo perché non capisce quanto è complicata la vita.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language truly used by the central nervous system.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

Any computing machine that is to solve a complex mathematical problem must be 'programmed' for this task. This means that the complex operation of solving that problem must be replaced by a combination of the basic operations of the machine.

It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.

By practicing the strictest economy and because of his odd jobs, the Fremonts were able to put aside a dowry for Yvonne, from their dollar a day, minus dues to the union. In 1920 the nest egg amounted to 2,000 francs ($286) and in 1926, to 4,500 francs ($100). Of such mathematics are world disasters made.

The best quantitative finance brings real insight into the relation between value and uncertainty, and it approaches the quality of real science; the worst is a pseudoscientific hodgepodge of complex mathematics used with obscure justification.

in this job you really need to know only four things: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—and most of the time you can get by without division!" I

But while we thank the mathematician for his aid in conquering Nature, we envy him his powers of understanding her. Though he deals, it would seem, entirely with abstractions, they are abstractions which, at his persuasion, supply the key to the profoundest secrets of the physical universe. He holds the clues to mazes where the clearest intellect, unaided, would wander hopelessly astray.

True beliefs are effects no less than false. In this respect magic and mathematics are on a level.

Music is at once a science and an art. It is rooted in physics and mathematics, hence it is a science; inspiration makes it an art, unconsciously utilizing the theorems of science. It is founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it works on. Sound is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind.

Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?

the seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.

in the case of the given numbers 1, 2, 3, everybody can see that the fourth proportional is 6, and all the more clearly because we infer in one single intuition the fourth number from the ratio we see the first number bears to the second.

David Hume, the great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, had put the cat among the pigeons with his notion of scepticism: that nothing can be proved, except in mathematics, and that much of what we take to be fact is merely conjecture.