Mathematical Quotes - Page 32

• The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

  Morris Kline

  Science, Reality, Order

  Morris Kline (1964). “Mathematics in Western Culture”, p.382, Oxford University Press

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• There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future.

  Jo Boaler

  Education, Teacher, Math

  Jo Boaler (2015). “What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success”, p.5, Penguin

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• The explorer is the person who is lost.

  Tim Cahill

  Lost, Persons, Explorers

  Tim Cahill (1987). “Jaguars ripped my flesh: adventure is a risky business”, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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• 

  To make a great dream come true, the first requirement is a great capacity to dream; the second is persistence.

  Cesar Chavez

  Dream, Persistence, Requirements

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• [1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another.

  Isaac Newton

  Science, Space, Air

  Sir Isaac Newton (1959). “Correspondence: 1676-1687”

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• Scientology is not written with disrespect toward God. It doesn't worship something that is evil. It is scientific, mathematical, and spiritual. The black community has to check it out and see what's there. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but you have to take a look.

  Doug E. Fresh

  Spiritual, Evil, Community

  "Scientology appealing to African-Americans" by Matthew Hay Brown, www.baltimoresun.com. September 7, 2009.

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• Without troublesome work, no one can have any concrete, full idea of what pure mathematical research is like or of the profusion of insights that can be obtained from it.

  Edmund Husserl

  Ideas, Research, Insight

  Edmund Husserl, Peter McCormick, Frederick Elliston (1981). “Husserl, shorter works”, Univ of Notre Dame Pr

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• I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

  Hari Kunzru

  Simple, Ideas, Patterns

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• I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say, 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

  Chad Kroeger

  Artist, Cobain, Strange

  "Our Hate Has Saved Nickelback" by Ian Crouch, www.newyorker.com. November 20, 2014.

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• From Roger Bacon, the 13th century Franciscan who pioneered the scientific method, to George Lemaitre, the 20th century Belgian priest who first developed a mathematical foundation for the 'Big Bang,' people of faith have played a key role in advancing scientific understanding.

  Kenneth R. Miller

  Keys, People, Understanding

  "Science And Religion: Incompatible?" by Science And Religion: Incompatible?, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 7, 2012.

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• Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s.

  Stephen Cole Kleene

  Mathematical Logic, Wisconsin, Undergraduate

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• The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.

  Georg Cantor

  Independent, Order, Numbers

  "Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1987.

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• The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.

  Alan Greenspan

  Years, Important, Genius

  1995 In the NewYork Times, 6 Mar, shortly after the collapse of Barings in Singapore brought about by a young derivatives trader.

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• Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Life, Lying, Waiting

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter VI : The Paradoxes of Christianity, 1908.

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• Justice to others and to ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses

  Albert Pike

  Squares, Circles, Justice

  Albert Pike (2013). “Morals and Dogma”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• Mathematical studies may serve for a pleasant entertainment for those hours which young men are apt to throw away upon their vices.

  John Arbuthnot

  Men, Vices, May

  George Atherton Aitken, John Arbuthnot (1892). “The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, M.D.: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians”

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• Here is a quilted book about mathematical practice, each patch wonderfully prepared. Part invitation to number theory, part autobiography, part sociology of mathematical training, Mathematics without Apologies brings us into contemporary mathematics as a living, active inquiry by real people. Anyone wanting a varied, cultured, and penetrating view of today's mathematics could find no better place to engage.

  Peter Galison

  Real, Book, Apology

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• We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.

  Dr. Seuss

  Thinking, White, Earth

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• Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

  Alan Turing

  Exercise, Two, Drawing

  "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, Volume 45, 1939.

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• This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.

  Steven G. Krantz

  Pain, Hate, Book

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• The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry ; a science for which this race created a new era.(...) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Powerful, Race, Intellectual

  "Cosmos". Book by H.G. Bohn, v2, p. 589,595, 1860.

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• We shall see that the mathematical treatment of the subject [of electricity] has been greatly developed by writers who express themselves in terms of the 'Two Fluids' theory. Their results, however, have been deduced entirely from data which can be proved by experiment, and which must therefore be true, whether we adopt the theory of two fluids or not. The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Data, Two, Doctrine

  James Clerk Maxwell (1873). “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism”, p.38

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• Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

  Isaac Asimov

  Mathematical Equations, Fuzzy, Substitutes

  Isaac Asimov (1986). “Foundation Trilogy”, Del Rey

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• As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

  William Winwood Reade

  Men, Atoms, Agents

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.186

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• What expressions we used - in part taken over and in part newly invented! above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us 'perpendicularly from above,' the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet.

  Karl Barth

  Taken, Men, Expression

  Karl Barth (1960). “The Humanity of God”, p.42, Westminster John Knox Press

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