Integers Quotes

• The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't even begin to think about in any very definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.

  Ronald Graham

  Rain, Math, Thinking

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• Integers are the fountainhead of all mathematics.

  Hermann Minkowski

  Fountainhead, Mathematics

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• The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Self, Mind

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.22, Broadway Books

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• Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next.

  Gregory Bateson

  Mean, Numbers, Next

  "Number is Different from Quantity". CoEvolution Quarterly, www.oikos.org. Spring 1978.

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• The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Math, Men, Lord

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• Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Math, Men, Doe

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• All of mathematics can be deduced from the sole notion of an integer; here we have a fact universally acknowledged today.

  Emile Borel

  Numbers, Today, Facts

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• The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules... One might therefore conjecture that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms.

  Kurt Gödel

  Simple, Two, Development

  "Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Volume I: Publications 1929-1936".

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• My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.

  George Armitage Miller

  Problem, Persecuted, Has Beens

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• God made the integers, man made the rest.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Men, Made

  Quoted in F Cajori A History of Mathematics (1919).

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• If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.

  Hal Abelson

  Real, Ideas, Numbers

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• Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

  Thomas Hardy

  Thinking, Fractions, Units

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “Jude the Obscure: Works of Hardy”, p.314, 谷月社

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• [L]ife ceases to be a fraction and becomes an integer.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick

  Fractions, Cease

  Harry Emerson Fosdick (1971). “The Real Problems of Real People: Solutions for Christians”

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• In this communication I wish first to show in the simplest case of the hydrogen atom (nonrelativistic and undistorted) that the usual rates for quantization can be replaced by another requirement, in which mention of "whole numbers" no longer occurs. Instead the integers occur in the same natural way as the integers specifying the number of nodes in a vibrating string. The new conception can be generalized, and I believe it touches the deepest meaning of the quantum rules.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Believe, Communication, Science

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• All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Simple, Mathematics, Form

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• I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said..."

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Friendship, Math, Wish

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

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• Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity, there is no such jump; and because jump is missing in the world of quantity, it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.

  Gregory Bateson

  Mean, Two, Numbers

  "Number is Different from Quantity". CoEvolution Quarterly, www.oikos.org. Spring 1978.

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• The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.

  Kurt Gödel

  Development, Well Known, Mathematics

  Kurt Gödel, S. Feferman (1986). “Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Volume I: Publications 1929-1936”, p.145, Oxford University Press

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• The gods and their tranquil abodes appear, which no winds disturb, nor clouds bedew with showers, nor does the white snow, hardened by frost, annoy them; the heaven, always pure, is without clouds, and smiles with pleasant light diffused.

  Lucretius

  Clouds, Light, Wind

  "De Rerum Natura". Book by Lucretius, III. 18,

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• Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer.

  Leah Hager Cohen

  Black, Tests, Pressure

  Leah Hager Cohen (2003). “Heart, You Bully, You Punk”, Viking Press

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• By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.

  Michael Lesy

  Memories, Sake, Firsts

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• The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.

  Lee Smolin

  Notebook, Real, Numbers

  Lee Smolin (2008). “Three Roads To Quantum Gravity”, p.106, Hachette UK

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• I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of integers for counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep makes 13 sheep; that 6 stones plus 7 stones make 13 stones? Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible? To me this is one of the strongest examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Indeed, I find it both strange and unexplainable.

  Richard Hamming

  Simple, Effectiveness, Numbers

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• Arithmetic starts with the integers and proceeds by successively enlarging the number system by rational and negative numbers, irrational numbers, etc... But the next quite logical step after the reals, namely the introduction of infinitesimals, has simply been omitted. I think, in coming centuries it will be considered a great oddity in the history of mathematics that the first exact theory of infinitesimals was developed 300 years after the invention of the differential calculus.

  Abraham Robinson

  Thinking, Oddities, Discovery

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