Mathematics Quotes - Page 11

• Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Disease, Generations

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• I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Analysis, Branches

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.117, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine's inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, "What happened with those two?" and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else.

  Primo Levi

  Sex, Men, Two

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• We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Brother, Book, Adventure

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2014). “Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)”, p.54, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Wherefore in all great works are Clerks so much desired? Wherefore are Auditors so well-fed? What causeth Geometricians so highly to be enhaunsed? Why are Astronomers so greatly advanced? Because that by number such things they find, which else would farre excell mans minde.

  Robert Recorde

  Numbers, Clerks, Auditors

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• Strong Reason and good fancy, joyn'd with experience and tryalls, so that we are assured of the good effects of it.

  Nicholas Hawksmoor

  Strong, Fancy, Reason

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• To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Mind, Invention, Barren

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• ... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Believe, Law

  Robert M. Pirsig (2009). “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values”, p.41, Harper Collins

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• There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they just "are" - they exist quite independently of us. The most that man can do is become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them.

  M. C. Escher

  Men, Discovery, Law

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• I came to the ... open gate of mathematics. From here, well-trodden paths lead in every direction, and since then I have often spent time there. Sometimes I think ... I have trodden all the paths ... and then I suddenly discover a new path and experience fresh delights.

  M. C. Escher

  Thinking, Delight, Path

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• In India, I learned a proverb that says, 'Distrust the calculation seven times over, the mathematician a hundred times.'

  Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza

  India, Seven, Hundred

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• Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Precise

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• You are the mountain and the valley.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  Mountain, Valleys

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• Mathematics may be the only exception in the sciences that leaves no room for skepicism. But, if mathematical results are exact as no empirical law can ever be, philosophers have discovered that they are not absolutely novel - instead, they are tautological.

  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

  Law, May, Rooms

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• We chose to do this work mathematically, which has the advantage of precision but is not always appreciated by readers. It is perhaps for this reason that anthropologists have not shown much interest in these models, unlike economists, for example, for whom the use of mathematics poses no problem. However, one could reach the same conclusions by using just a bit of common sense.

  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

  Common Sense, Example, Use

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• Of the properties of mathematics, as a language, the most peculiar one is that by playing formal games with an input mathematical text, one can get an output text which seemingly carries new knowledge. The basic examples are furnished by scientific or technological calculations: general laws plus initial conditions produce predictions, often only after time-consuming and computer-aided work. One can say that the input contains an implicit knowledge which is thereby made explicit.

  IU?. I. Manin

  Law, Games, Peculiar

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• Art lives on the mental plane (the real painting is not the set of dry pigments on the canvas nor is a symphony the sequence of sound waves that convey it to our ear) but, as the post-modernists insist, is reinterpreted in new contexts by each appreciator. As for gossip, which includes the vast majority of our thoughts, its essence is its relation to a unique local part of time and space.

  David Mumford

  Art, Real, Unique

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• The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."

  Donald Knuth

  Book, Exercise, Important

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• It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Destiny, Numbers

  Bertrand Russell (2014). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell”, p.162, Routledge

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• ... the word "theory" ... was originally an Orphic word, which Cornford interprets as "passionate sympathetic contemplation" ... For Pythagoras, the "passionate sympathetic contemplation" was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge ... To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics in school this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives, from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural.

  Bertrand Russell

  School, Views, Giving

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.33, Simon and Schuster

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• It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.

  Bertrand Russell

  Kings, Plato, Teaching

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.95, Routledge

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• The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Disappointment, Math, Molecules

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.1, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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• All science requires mathematics.

  Roger Bacon

  Science, Accounts

  1267 OpusMajus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

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• Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.

  G. H. Hardy

  Creative, Contemplative, Subjects

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.143, Cambridge University Press

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• There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.

  Paul Lockhart

  Psychedelic, Poetic, Radical

  "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart, genius.com. January 1, 2002.

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