Math Quotes - Page 32

• The best defense against logic is ignorance.

  Blaise Pascal

  Ignorance, Defense, Logic

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• There are no solved problems; there are only problems that are more or less solved.

  Henri Poincare

  Knowledge, Ontology, Logic

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• Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs. Other people learn from explanations.

  Ralph P. Boas, Jr.

  Knowledge, People, Logic

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• I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

  May Sarton

  Science, Order, Way

  May Sarton (2014). “As We Are Now: A Novel”, p.19, Open Road Media

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• Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'.

  Billy Preston

  Song: Nothing From Nothing

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• Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Euclid, Mathematical Beauty, Sandals

  "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" l. 11 (1923)

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• The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the application of physical truth in the broadest sense of the word.

  William Fogg Osgood

  Truth, Statistics, Aids

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• Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

  Bertrand Russell

  Littles, Statistics, Might

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.51, 谷月社

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• A math lecture without a proof is like a movie without a love scene. This talk has two proofs.

  Hendrik Lenstra

  Two, Lectures, Scene

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• Mathematics is for lazy people.

  Peter Hilton

  Lazy People, People, Lazy

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• I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

  Freeman Dyson

  Marriage, Divorce, Past

  Freeman J. Dyson (1996). “Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson with Commentary”, p.169, American Mathematical Soc.

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• Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.

  Ernst Mach

  May, Problem, Economy

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• Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.

  IU?. I. Manin

  Logic, Biology, Greater

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• It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

  Henri Poincare

  Intuition, Logic, Criticize

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.746, Modern Library

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• So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Reputation, Sanctity, Incapacity

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook K 52, 1799.

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• Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

  Lewis Carroll

  Mathematics, Gaiety

  Lewis Carroll (1960). “The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll”, p.223, Courier Corporation

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• Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.

  Hermann Weyl

  Strong, Practice, Hygiene

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• Mathematics was born and nurtured in a cultural environment. Without the perspective which the cultural background affords, a proper appreciation of the content and state of present-day mathematics is hardly possible.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Appreciation, Perspective, Environment

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• The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

  Isaac Newton

  Law, Ancient, Subordinates

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• There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Mysterious, Abstraction, Mathematics

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• It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Invention, Observation, Truism

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• Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.

  Paul Erdos

  Problem, Ready, Mathematics

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• To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciences is to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls.

  Pafnuty Chebyshev

  Demand, Cows, Bulls

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• The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

  Oswald Spengler

  Art, Imagination, Style

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1950). “Form and actuality”

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• The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

  Norbert Wiener

  Success, Games, Chess Game

  "Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth". Book by Norbert Wiener, 1964.

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