Quotes About Mathematics

While twentieth-century physicists were not able to identify any convincing mathematical constants underlying the fine structure, partly because such thinking has normally not been encouraged, a revolutionary suggestion was recently made by the Czech physicist Raji Heyrovska, who deduced that the fine structure constant, ...really is defined by the [golden] ratio ....

Four is the only numeral spelled with the same amount of letters as its numerical value.

Maybe I'm obsessed with numbers because they always tell a story and unlike people, they never lie.

In Operations, many of our data sets have what we call 'chi squared' distribution. Using

All these lands—is it possible even for mathematicians or their disciples to count all of them and know the number of all the lands visited?

The time seems right for revisiting D'Arcy Thompson's challenge: "How far even then mathematics will suffice to describe, and physics to explain, the fabric of the body, no man can foresee. It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, all . . . chemistry . . . are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think it is not so.

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.

I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.

In der Mathematik ist die Kunst Fragen zu stellen wertvoller als Probleme zu lösen.

what wonderful power there is in the real numbers, since one is in a position to determine uniquely, with a single coordinate, the elements of an n-dimensional continuous space.

The idea of considering the infinitely large not only in the form of the unlimitedly increasing magnitude and in the closely related form of convergent infinite series...but to also fix it mathematically by numbers in the definite form of the completed infinite was logically forced upon me, almost against my will since it was contrary to traditions which I had come to cherish in the course of many years of scientific effort and investigations.

Si un ángel nos hablara de su filosofía, creo que algunas frases muy bien podrían sonar como "2 por 2 son 13".

The brain is a statistical, probabilistic system, with logic and mathematics running as higher-level processes. The computer is a logical, mathematical system, upon which higher-level statistical, probabilistic systems, such as human language and intelligence, could possibly be built.

That zero and one were sufficient for logic as well as arithmetic was established by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1679, following the lead given by Thomas Hobbes in his Computation, or Logique of 1656.

Mathematical rigor is like clothing; in its style it ought to suit the occasion, and it diminishes comfort and restricts freedom of movement if it is either too loose or too tight.

Let us now divide the time interval from o to t into a large number of very short time intervals and draw vertical lines as shown in the figure, thus forming a large number of thin tall rectangles.

But since the velocity is equal to the height of the thin rectangle, and the time interval to its base, this product is equal to the area of the rectangle.

Repeating the same argument for each thin rectangle, we come to the conclusion that the total distance covered during the time interval (o,t) is equal to the area of the staircase or, in the limit, to the area of the triangle ABC.

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

Philosophical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from concepts; mathematical knowledge is knowledge which reason gains from the construction of concepts.

The march of mathematics is pursued on a broad and magnificent highway, which the latest posterity shall frequent without fear of danger or impediment.

Fuck that: take shagging n peeve oot ay the equation n yir left wi the sqare root ay swee fuck all!

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.