Quotes About Mathematics

Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.

The problem is that modern fundamental physics is so far from you and me. The mathematics has become so much more complicated that you need at least 10 years to understand it. Fundamental physics has advanced so far from the understanding of most people that there is really a big disconnect.

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.

There are some parts I like about school. I like math a lot, and I like physics.

I was nearly as far behind in calculus as I was in physics. But I wasn't the only woman in the class, so I felt more comfortable asking questions.

I came from a very small high school in which there was no guidance and not any appreciable amount of physics taught, nor much mathematics. So I didn't know what academia was all about until I got to college.

Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops that seem to warp and curve. The shapes coalesce into the right number. I never write anything down.

My specific goal is to revolutionize the future of the species. Mathematics is just another way of predicting the future.

Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation.

Greek civilization derived in its religion, its philosophy, its mathematics and much else, from the ancient civilizations of Africa above all from Egypt of the Pharaohs. To those 'founding fathers' in classical Greece, any notion that Africans were inferior, morally or intellectually, would have seemed silly. –Basil Davidson, Africa in History (1991)

On the surface, Thorne's mathematical reasoning is impeccable. Einstein's equations indeed show that wormhole solutions allow for time to pass at different rates on either side of the wormhole, so that time travel, in principle, is possible. The trick, of course, is to create the wormhole in the first place.

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. —John von Neumann

Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.

Charles Bascomb was a man who loved figures—the genuine, Arabic kind, that is.

When one made love to zero spheres embraced their arches and prime numbers caught their breath...

I can remember times when we'd be having parties, and people would be dancing and everything and I would be sitting there in the middle doing calculus, just doing my little thing.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

Danny knew far more about science than was taught in his grade in school, and could do long division in his head and use a slide rule as easily as he could throw a baseball

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

The melding of experimental techniques with mathematical description was the great leap forward, accomplished in the seventeenth century, that brought us to the point at which, as Krauss put it, " Ã¢â'¬Ëœnatural philosophy' became physics.

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.