Square Roots Quotes

• If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here

  Tom Lehrer

  Commitment, Squares, Two

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• The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

  Terry Pratchett

  Squares, Roots, Numbers

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• Is the square root of hate the same thing as love times love?

  Eugene Mirman

  Hate, Squares, Roots

  7 Copy quote

• Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Squares, Roots, World

  Yevgeny Zamyatin “We”, Two-Gunner Pulp Press

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• There was a young fellow from Trinity,
  Who took the square root of infinity.
  But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets;
  He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

  George Gamow

  Science, Math, Squares

  "One, Two, Three...Infinity". Book by George Gamow, 1947.

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• Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Squares, Roots, Evil

  "Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil". Scientific American, 249 (3), September 1983.

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• The square root of I is I.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Squares, Roots

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Bend Sinister”, p.16, Penguin UK

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• The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

  Keith Devlin

  Zero, Roots, Numbers

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• Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

  Henry Spencer

  Roman Numerals, Roots, Squares

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• I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.

  Marcel Proust

  Women, Squares, Roots

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.193, Modern Library

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• Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

  Bill Nye

  Art, Kids, Math

  "Bill Nye: Cell phones aren't making us dumb". Interview with Wilson Rothman, www.nbcnews.com. March 23, 2010.

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• Square root of a cosine? How is that ever going to be useful?

  Aprilynne Pike

  Squares, Roots

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• How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

  Stephen Leacock

  Fall, Struggle, Math

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• But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

  Philip Pullman

  Science, Thinking, Squares

  "Northern Lights". Book by Philip Pullman, 1995.

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• You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Squares, Roots

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• There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time.

  Tom Holt

  Squares, Play, Roots

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• I met a man once who told me that far from believing in the square root of minus one, he didn't believe in minus one. This is at any rate a consistent attitude.

  Edward Charles Titchmarsh

  Attitude, Believe, Men

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• The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.

  Carson McCullers

  Squares, Roots, And Love

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• The square root of 69 is 8(ate) som'

  Drake

  Sex, Humble, Squares

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• Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no square root; thirdly that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle is to the diameter.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Squares, Circles, Roots

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• That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Squares, Views, Roots

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• For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

  Tim O'Brien

  Thinking, Squares, Roots

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No one fully understands spinors. Their algebra is formally understood but their general significance is mysterious. In some sense they describe the 'square root' of geometry and, just as understanding the square root of -1 took centuries, the same might be true of spinors.

  Michael Atiyah

  Squares, Roots, Understanding

  19 Copy quote

• The square root of nothing.

  R. D. Laing

  Squares, Roots

  "RD Laing: The Abominable Family Man". The Sunday Times, April 12, 2009.

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• The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial?

  John Perry

  Book, School, Boys

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