Mathematical Quotes - Page 27

• I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.

  Ronald Fisher

  Believe, Teaching, Men

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• The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Pythagorean Theorem, Analysis

  "Statistics in agricultural research". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 1934.

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• The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.

  Philip J. Davis

  Math, Numbers, Helping

  Philip J. Davis, William G. Chinn (1985). “3.1416 and all that”, Birkhauser

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• Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.

  Tobias Dantzig

  Math, Judging, Decision

  Tobias Dantzig (2005). “Number: The Language of Science”, Dutton Juvenile

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• Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.

  Michael C. Reed

  Sex, Math, Observation

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• Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

  Rene Descartes

  Powerful, Knowledge, Math

  RENE DESCARTES (1952). “RULES FOR THE DIRECTION OF THE MIND DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE MEDITATIONS AND REPLIES THE GEOMETRY”

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• Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

  Marvin Minsky

  Real, Knowledge, Math

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• Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so.

  Robertson Davies

  Math, Fool, Enough

  Robertson Davies (1949). “The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks”, Clarke, Irwin

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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, Math, Statistics

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• I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Math, Feelings, Lectures

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.135, Cambridge University Press

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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

  Math, Littles, Statistics

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

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• Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life itself.

  Claude Fayette Bragdon

  Math, Handwriting, Spirit

  Claude Fayette Bragdon (2005). “Architecture and Democracy”, p.61, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Math, Mankind, Complexes

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• Mathematics is for lazy people.

  Peter Hilton

  Math, Lazy People, People

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• Thus we can get the correct answer for the probability of partial reflection by imagining (falsely) that all reflection comes from only the front and back surfaces. In this intuitively easy analysis, the 'front surface' and 'back surface' arrows are mathematical constructions that give us the right answer, whereas .... a more accurate representation of what is really going on: partial reflection is the scattering of light by electrons inside the glass.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Reflection, Arrows, Glasses

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• Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.

  Robert Higgs

  Exercise, Done, Obsession

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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

  Math, May, Problem

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• Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.

  Carl Sandburg

  Math, Numbers, Pigeons

  Carl Sandburg, Frances Schoonmaker Bolin (1995). “Carl Sandburg”, p.17, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through the process of 'seeing'.

  Roger Penrose

  Plato, Ideas, Mind

  Roger Penrose (1999). “The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”, p.554, OUP Oxford

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• Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Real, Character, Math

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• We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Math, Law, Facts

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (2014). “The Tractatus According to Its Own Form”, p.38, Lulu.com

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• The theory of ramification is one of pure colligation, for it takes no account of magnitude or position; geometrical lines are used, but these have no more real bearing on the matter than those employed in genealogical tables have in explaining the laws of procreation.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Real, Math, Law

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• So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Learning, Cutting, Math

  James Joseph Sylvester (1877). “Address Delivered by J.J. Sylvester, F.R.S. (corresponding Member of the Institute of France), Professor of Mathematics, at Johns Hopkins University on Commemoration Day, February 22, 1877”

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• Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

  Henri Poincare

  Discovery, Generations, Spontaneity

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• Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.

  Catharine Cox Miles

  Fun, Wall, Mean

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