Mathematical Quotes - Page 34

• It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.

  Henry John Stephen Smith

  Beauty, Math, Science

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• The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Beauty, Truth, Math

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• What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

  Nora Ephron

  Food, Long, Cooking

  FaceBook post by Nora Ephron from Sep 06, 2016

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• A child is born on that day, and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual Karma. His horoscope is a challenging portrait, revealing his unalterable past and its probable future result. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by men of intuitive wisdom - These are few.

  Sri Yukteswar Giri

  Karma, Children, Men

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• To throw in a fair game at Hazards only three-spots, when something great is at stake, or some business is the hazard, is a natural occurrence and deserves to be so deemed; and even when they come up the same way for a second time if the throw be repeated. If the third and fourth plays are the same, surely there is occasion for suspicion on the part of a prudent man.

  Gerolamo Cardano

  Business, Math, Men

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• Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.

  Douglas Adams

  Time, Math, Science

  Douglas Adams (2010). “The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.427, Del Rey

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• We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Math, Long

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• Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married.

  Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

  Time, Math, Mind

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• Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced . . . the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously . . . this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work. . . .

  Andre Weil

  Time, Work, Math

  Andre Weil (2012). “The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician”, p.91, Birkhäuser

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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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• Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, because they want to comprehend at a glance and are not used to seeking for first principles. Those, on the other hand, who are accustomed to reason from first principles do not understand matters of feeling at all, because they look for first principles and are unable to comprehend at a glance.

  Blaise Pascal

  Math, Hands, Judging

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• In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Math, Ideas, Issues

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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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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• In studying mathematics or simply using a mathematical principle, if we get the wrong answer in sort of algebraic equation, we do not suddenly feel that there is an anti-mathematical principle that is luring us into the wrong answers.

  Eric Butterworth

  Math, Principles, Wrong Answers

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• The greatest reward lies in making the discovery; recognition can add little or nothing to that.

  Franz Ernst Neumann

  Lying, Math, Discovery

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• Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

  Nathanael West

  Prayer, Math, Men

  1933 Miss Lonely hearts.

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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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• Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Math, Numbers, Law

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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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• A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Learning, Mean, Math

  John Edensor Littlewood (1953). “A mathematicians's miscellany”

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• Attaching significance to invariants is an effort to recognize what, because of its form or colour or meaning or otherwise, is important or significant in what is only trivial or ephemeral. A simple instance of failing in this is provided by the poll-man at Cambridge, who learned perfectly how to factorize a^2 - b^2 but was floored because the examiner unkindly asked for the factors of p^2 - q^2.

  Herbert Turnbull

  Learning, Math, Simple

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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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