Quotes About Mathematics

Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

Equations are the devil's sentences.

An algorithm is a finite answer to an infinite number of questions.

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.

There is nothing in the world more perfect than a slide rule. Its burnished aluminum feels cool against your lips, and if you hold it level to the light you can see God's most perfect right angle in each of its corners.

It's my belief that you can take everyone down a logical path if you take them slowly enough, and the trouble is that mathematical brains can get scrambled a little bit on the way. You get a bad teacher, it messes you up for the rest of the journey.

A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.

There's no such thing as a 'maths brain.' Anyone can be numerate; it's just a matter of confidence. There are so many opportunities to improve your skills during everyday life, doing even a little a day can make maths feel more familiar and less scary.

I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.

méthode, selon lequel tout donné a un droit originelm » ; la psychologie phénoménologique sera élucidation de ce droit originel tel qu'il concerne le donné dans le flux immanent de la conscience : elle constituera une éidétique de la conscience tout comme les mathématiques constituent une éidétique de la nature.

Technical speaking one is a beautiful number. One is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It is the first two numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It is the empty product. Any number raised to the zero power is one. It might be argued that one is the most independent number known to man. It can do things no other number is capable of.

In other words, the reason why the string theory cannot be solved is that twenty-first mathematics has not yet been discovered.

One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unification will be the unification of mathematics as well.

The problem is that while twenty-first-century physics fell accidentally into the twentieth century, twenty-first-century mathematics hasn't been invented yet. It seems that we may have to wait for twenty-first-century mathematics before we can make any progress, or the current generation of physicists must invent twenty-first-century mathematics on their own.

There isn't an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as "muggy weather is uncomfortable" or "mothers are older than their daughters." There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common.

mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." And that beauty is symmetry.

So string theory and M-theory are really the same theory, except that string theory is a reduction of eleven-dimensional M-theory to ten dimensions.)

Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe its properties.

Roughly speaking, the greater the value of the metric tensor, the greater the crumpling of the sheet. No mattet how crumpled the sheet of paper, the metric tensor gives us a simple means of measuring its curvature at any point. If we flattened the crumpled sheet completely, then we would retrieve the formula of Pythagoras.

si un gato puede comerse un ratón en un minuto, ¿cuánto tiempo tardan un millón de gatos en comerse un millón de ratones? Respuesta: un minuto.)

Er is ooit eens heel keurig uitgerekend dat je van een leven lang regelmatig te joggen twee jaar ouder wordt; maar uit een andere berekening blijkt dan weer dat je daarvoor alles bij elkaar twee jaar moet joggen.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.