Quotes About Mathematics

Indeed, the very word "zero" has Indian origins: The Indian word for zero was sunya, meaning "empty," which the Arabs turned into sifr. Western scholars Latinized this into zephirus, the root of our zero.

If you're troubled by the fact that 80/10 doesn't add up to 100, you've discovered the second confusing thing about the Rule. The 80 and the 20 are percentages of different things, and thus don't need to equal 100.

Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.

Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.

Permaina adalah uraian matrmatis dari hubungan antara strategi-strategi dan kemungkinan hasil-hasilnya.

In the history of culture the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.

What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?" My answer: "Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry that it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.

Squares were good. Efficient. He approved of squares.

The author has greatly enjoyed being able to discuss this subject with a few mathematicians and physicists. The greatest handicap to cooperation is certainly the difference in terms between the individual, specialized fields of knowledge. We hope that this chasm will be bridged in time and that through cybernetics, a true bridge between physics and the automaton theory can be built.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper until you get the right answer.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky -- or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

In general, it would be a peculiar type of 'justice' to declare a majority all the better and more just the more overwhelming it is, and to maintain abstractly that ninety-eight people abusing two persons is by far not so unjust as fifty-one people mistreating forty-nine. At this point, pure mathematics becomes simple inhumanity.

In 1877 he published his paper "Probabilistic foundations of heat theory", in which he formulated what Einstein later called the Boltzmann principle; the interpretation of the concept of entropy as a mathematically well-defined measure of what one can call the "disorder" of atoms, which had already appeared in his work of 1872, is here extended and becomes a general statement.

Empowered by new conceptual tools and by mathematics, Einstein writes the equations which describe Democritus's void and finds for its 'certain physics' a colourful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time slows down in the vicinity of a planet, and the boundless expanses of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea

A calculation, in fact, demonstrates that without nodes, physical space has no volume. In other words, it is in the nodes of the graph, not in the lines, that the volume of space "resides." The lines "link together" individual volumes sitting at the nodes.

With a great deal of effort, seeking help from friends better versed in mathematics than himself, Einstein learns Riemann's math—and writes an equation where R is proportional to the energy of matter. In words: spacetime curves more where there is matter. That is it.

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or Principia, the book that founded modern science.

This is Dirac's quantum mechanics: a recipe for calculating the spectra of the variables, and a recipe for calculating the probability that one or another value in the spectrum appears during an interaction.

The career of a mathematician begins when he realizes that a subject he is studying is not presented in the right way: it starts with an act of rebellion…").

George Dantzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.

You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability….