Quotes About Mathematics

I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.

Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.

Trillian punched up the figures. They showed two-to-the-power-of-Infinity-minus-one to one against (an irrational number that only has a conventional meaning in Improbability Physics).

If such a thing is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability.

Bistromathics," he said, "the most powerful computational force known to parascience.

Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years. Slowly

Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling.

an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a

I think there's something heavenly about numbers, anyway.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

That fellow couldn't count his balls and get the same number twice.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded...

Infine vorrei avanzare qualche congettura sulle ripercussioni che le macchine calcolatrici elettroniche digitali avranno sulla matematica. Ho già accennato al fatto che l'ACE svolgerà il lavoro di circa diecimila calcolatori umani; c'è da aspettarsi dunque che il calcolo manuale su larga scala scomparirà.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It's as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There's a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That's what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It's as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There's a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

As I say, there was this movement to try to bring philosophers and mathematicians together into an organization where they would talk to each other. An organization wasn't effective unless you had a journal. That's about all I know.

I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.

The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus.