Quotes About Mathematics

not every curve is a line.

It comes back to his math-trained habits of thought. A mathematician is always asking, "What assumptions are you making?

Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human hand.

Geometry is the cilantro of math.

Virahanka sequence,

numerically flavored advice.

All mathematical writing is creative writing.

You can do linear regression without thinking about whether the phenomenon you're modeling is actually close to linear. But you shouldn't.

Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument.

The lessons of mathematics are simple ones and there are no numbers in them: that there is structure in the world; that we can hope to understand some of it and not just gape at what our senses present to us; that our intuition is stronger with a formal exoskeleton than without one. And that mathematical certainity is one thing, the softer convictions we find attached to us in everyday life another, and we should keep track of the difference if we can.

countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That's not the stuff war movies are made of, but it's the stuff wars are made of. And there's math every step of the way. —

There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we're still wrong about. We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too. I'll do my best to resist that temptation. But watch me carefully.

If you have before you a square whose side has length X, its area is X times X—indeed, that's why we call the operation of multiplying a number by itself squaring!

Statistics is not an exact science. It is an investigative technique.

Si los hombres le dedicasen a la física o a las matemáticas una cuarta parte de las horas que tardan en resolver sus líos amorosos, la ciencia avanzaría en proporciones geométricas.

ya sabéis que el gran Platón dijo que las matemáticas tienen la finalidad de conducir al espíritu a la contemplación de las esencias inteligibles.

The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.

The ignorant Looker-on can't imagine what the Limner means by those seemingly rude Lines and Scrawls, which he intends for the Rudiments of a Picture, and the Figures of Mathematick Operation are Nonsense, and Dashes at a Venture, to one uninstructed in Mechanicks. We are in the Dark to one another's Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their Design, even to sagacious Inquisitors

The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.

After the death of Archimedes in 212 BCE, the topic of motion was effectively abandoned; it did not resurface for another 1,400 years, when Gerard of Brussels revived the mathematical works of Euclid and Archimedes and came very close to defining speed as a ratio of distance to time.

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.

Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'.

Gödel saw beyond the surface level of number theory, realizing that numbers could represent any kind of structure.

Contrary to all prior belief, the vast continent of arithmetical truth cannot be brought into systematic order by laying down for once and for all a fixed set of axioms and rules of inference from which every true arithmetical statement can be formally derived.