Quotes About Mathematics

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.

Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

The beginnings of Algebra I found far more difficult, perhaps as a result of bad teaching, I was made to learn by heart: 'The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.' I had not the vaguest idea what this meant, and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way.

I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was :'Weary of earth and laden with my sin.' At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unedurable. In adolescense, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

1) 0 is a number. (2) The successor of any number is a number. (3) No two numbers have the same successor. (page 6) (4) 0 is not the successor of any number. (5) Any property which belongs to 0, and also to the successor of every number which has the property, belongs to all numbers.

Frege's work it followed that arithmetic, and pure mathematics generally, is nothing but a prolongation of deductive logic. This disproved Kant's theory that arithmetical propositions are 'synthetic' and involve a reference to time. The development of pure mathematics from logic was set forth in detail in Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and myself.

a priori knowledge such as mathematics or logic is general, whereas all experience is particular.

These two sentences suffice to show, as I shall try to prove, that Bergson does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it.

The number 0 is the number of terms in a class which has no members, i.e. in the class which is called the null-class.

0 is the class whose only member is the null-class.

It remains to define successor. Given any number n, let ? be a class which has n members, and let x be a term which is not a member of ?. Then the class consisting of ? with x added on will have n+1 members.

Peano. He showed that the entire theory of the natural numbers could be derived from three primitive ideas and five primitive propositions in addition to those of pure logic.

Any theory on the principles of mathematics must always be inductive i.e. it must lie in the fact that the theory in question enables us to deduce ordinary mathematics.

every progression verifies Peano's five axioms.

It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical significance.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

I believe in numbers and signs.

scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.

But when we work with numbers and abstract reasoning, the benefit to our society is infinite.

When she was a teenager D'Agostino told a friend that she wanted to go to university to study Death, Stars and Mathematics. Inexplicably the University of Manchester didn't offer such a course, so she settled for Mathematics.

She used to be a mathematician. Now she looks for omens and signs. At one time she thought math would clarify the world for her. She knew her link to real things was weak [...] She had hoped knowledge of mathematics, the world's rules, might strengthen her hold. But it did not. The world turned opaque and medieval, its every event mysterious. Now she uses a private mathematics, one made from omens and signs and dreams.

Algebra written across a blackboard hurts As a tight shoe hurts; it can't be walked in. Music, a song score, hurts, How far lies one note from another?

Speaking in math terms, they are one to the infinite power. Jesus said, "The Father and I are one