Quotes About Mathematics

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker. - The World And The Door

I, too, was fiercely independent and thought I could make two equal four.

To be a scholar of mathematics you must be born with talent, insight, concentration, taste, luck, drive and the ability to visualize and guess.

what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you've learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.

It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are wrong, by betting against his representation of the world.

Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.

Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.

Most of the examples used in this book were created with my Monte Carlo generator, which I introduce in this chapter. Yet it is far more a way of thinking than a computational method. Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the "well-published" (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.

La pequeño es hermoso en muchos otros aspectos. Quedémonos, por ahora, con que lo pequeño (como agregado, es decir, como conjunto de unidades pequeñas) es más antifrágil que lo grande: en realidad, lo grande está condenado a caer, una propiedad matemática que explicaré más adelante y que, por desgracia, parece ser universal porque se aplica a las grandes empresas, a los grandes mamíferos y a las grandes administraciones.

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking. We will see that probability is a qualitative subject.

Another recent event is the almost-instant bankruptcy, in 1998, of a financial investment company (hedge fund) called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which used the methods and risk expertise of two "Nobel economists," who were called "geniuses" but were in fact using phony, bell curve–style mathematics while managing to convince themselves that it was great science and thus turning the entire financial establishment into suckers.

Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don't formally understand anything.

We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics—

Mathematics is not just a "numbers game," it is a way of thinking.

Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

as a patent side effect of mathematics is making people over-optimize and cut corners, causing fragility. Just look how the new is increasingly more perishable than the old.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal word of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought.

Sometimes people who feel fear in the human realm drop to a very low level of consciousness in their relationships and seek the safety and security of competence in the impersonal world of machines, mathematics, or abstract thought. No matter what heights they may attain professionally, their self esteem remains flawed. We cannot with impunity run from so important an aspect of life

If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows

Well, we all ended up dead, that was just mathematics.